Of the necessity for vocabulary, illustrated!

I was working with my buddy Geoff on his house today. His pre-school daughter was around, having been spared the kindergarden. She, of course, tried to help Geoff and Tay play with the big boys toys, mostly from afar ( not always ) and mostly by voice though. Which became problematic on occasion because some tools had no name for her yet so that a crash course in construction vocabulary ended up being provided. Which reminded me that years ago, while working in moving …

this colleague of mine, glad that summer was showing up, tried to entice me in appreciation of the beauty of nature by pointing and saying : “Oh! Look, a squirrel!”

Which is fine in English but in the language that we were using then, it came with a wrong gender marking which I pointed out in turn! He glumly, with latent annoyance, answered : “Male female, you caught it; it has fur and four legs!”

Despite the nearly vocable by vocable inherently anti-coherence slant of this sentence ( -not the same/no, I didn’t/not enough data ), one can show both goodwill and faith and interpret it as an attempt  to instate less importance to the way we use language. At the moment, on the spot, I lacked other means than futile oral explanations that left my “opponent” dubitative. And our 5 year old helper today was more open to new concepts; don’t diss’ kids on age alone!

So once the memory struck today, I immediately thought 💡 Visual aids! 💡

So here we go : Let’s examine requirements, all two of them : 4-legged and fur, the order notwithstanding.

-“OK? So …




and not so long ago :

??? Really?”

To which he intellectually volleyed back with : “What?” So that I smashed him with

– “And mind you there is also

,

also four legs and fur and leading us to envision slight changes by adding legs ( in pairs to make adding them easy ) so that 6-legs with fur,

That would be Rihanna!

or eights legs with fur in 2 variants

common ,

and rarer,

as well as, if I may jump angoras lobsters that bio-geneticists are working on in China, 12 legs and fur :

He didn’t have the visual aids and he was darn glad lunch interrupted me, let me tell you! 😈

I’m not a grammar nazi either, I just like my definitions functional, thank you very much …

and good evening all, Tay.

P.S. That last image was hard to find! Phew! I had thought of it back then imaging a cat sprawled across two chairs’ adjoining seats. This is much hotter! 😉