Parenting - The Involuntary Zulu

( Originally Published 1914 )

By taking the trouble to speak with precision one gains the habit of thinking rightly.--CONDILLAC.

NOT long ago I was absorbed in a book on anthropology, when a small boy cousin about four years old came running into the room and after a little hesitation stationed himself in front of me. I looked up to see what he wanted, had a pair of rubbers thrust into my face, and heard Jack say in a loud, hard tone of command : " Put my rubbers on, why don't -ye? " I felt an irritable desire to retaliate for the rudeness and said, with the cheap and easy irony of an adult towards a child at fault : " Why, of course, Jack; I only live to wait on you."

There was a long silence as I tugged at the minute rubbers. Then I leaned back in my chair and took up my book again. The child stood for a moment hanging his head until finally with a sigh he walked soberly out of the room, all the sunshine gone from his face.

I was in the middle of a very interesting chapter on the language of savages, in the course of which the author dealt vividly with the curious limitations of speech among primitive peoples. I was surprised at the great importance this scientist attributed to the matter of language. He said, and proved, that many simple ideas cannot be conceived by savages, not because their brains are congenitally insufficient, but because they have no words for ideas. For instance, they may have words which mean "water-in-the-pail " or " water-steaming-over-the-fire " or " water-in-the-river," but absolutely no word for the simple abstraction " water," and hence (this was the point on which my scientist laid such stress) no conception of that simple abstraction. In Zulu there are words for " my-father," " his-or-her-father," " your-father," " their-father," " the-father-who-is-not-here," etc., all cumbersome polysyllables, without any element in common; and yet not a Zulu alive could express in his native tongue the simple idea of "father," an abstraction so simple that any child could conceive it.

This principle laboriously applied to the whole vocabulary means that instead of a liberating medium for self-expression as a language should be, the speech of the Zulus consists of prison bars, shutting their thoughts inexorably into the narrow confines of the concrete. The tongue of the Zulus does not only not express their ideas, it slams a trap-door down on the head of any thought which might try to emerge from the dead-level of the most primitive experience. The author of the book ended this chapter with a statement of the marvelous advance in civilization when savages are provided with a more adequate language, and made an eloquent plea to all civilized nations in charge of primitive races to aid the advance of these simple people by taking away their clumsy, inexpressive language, and laying before their feet the clear, straight path of a modern analytic tongue.

I laid down my book to meditate on this (to me) entirely new and surprisingly high valuation of language as an actual aid to mental and moral growth, and caught sight of Jack moping forlornly on the front walk, making a pretense of playing with his bow and arrow. Perhaps it was the sight of these weapons, reminding me of the savages of whom I had been reading, perhaps my affection for the little fellow gave me a moment of divination of his heart, in any case I thrilled with the exciting experience of a brand-new idea. What are children if not primitive people for whose intellectual advance we civilized adults have the responsibility? I leaned to the open window and called the child in. He stubbed along listlessly. " Jack," I asked, " what does Maida say to you when she asks you to do something? " Jack is being brought up under the nurse maid system. Maida is the name of his kindly, German American, warm hearted nurse-girl.

Jack stared at me blankly, evidently not under-standing my question. I repeated it in a simpler form: "Why, when she wants you to take off your coat, what does she say? "

Jack's reply opened wide the door of comprehension for me. " She says," the little boy quoted the phrase and intonation with loud, ready confidence, " she says, ' Take off yer coat, why don't ye?' "

From the pages of the serious, scholarly book on my lap, treating of the linguistic peculiarities of howling savages in Borneo and Africa, there poured a sudden illuminating light upon the unhappy little twentieth century boy at my knee, misunderstandingly blamed for something over which he has as little control as over the clothes on his back. His family take him to the best clothier in town for his coats and. trousers ; but the ready-made language in which he is expected to clothe his ideas and feelings is the most grotesque misfit for the dawning impulses and aspirations of his sensitive baby-nature. It is as though he were required to stumble about in the cast off clothes of a Bowery tough, and then blamed because he did not present a neat appearance, and had not a quick, alert gait. For his is not even Maida's language, although he learns it from her. She is being just as much misrepresented as Jack is. Her foster-mother-country has taken no pains to provide her with a language which shall suitably express her gentle, loving heart. In her native German, very likely she has half-a-dozen comely phrases to choose from when she wishes to make a request; but her English vocabulary, grammar, and intonation (the last the worst of all) were learned of her sister's slangy, East side, janitor husband, and Maida is as helplessly bound down by its limitations as a savage by his bungling language. And she is passing this meager, poverty stricken, unlovely Zulu-talk on to our Jack!

For while it is true that he does not associate exclusively with Maida, she it is who is with him at the important hours when something is happening to him, when his attention is fixed on the words being used, when he is having his bath or his dinner or being dressed or put to bed. The talk of the rest of the family is to him more or less as stilted "book talk" is to us, while Maida's speech is the honest, simple language of everyday wants, to be used in ordinary life.

I took the little boy up on my lap, holding him in a remorsefully close embrace, and, calling down silent blessings on the anthropological gentleman who from his distant, book-lined workroom had forced an idea into my dense adult head, I reviewed the little scene in the new light of understanding, and perceived not only its significance, but that of a hundred other similar scenes with little children in which I had played the same obtuse role, as wholly muddle headed as the poor children themselves, helplessly unable to make out what the trouble is, and only dully aware that they are not happy. Jack had come running in, looking for someone to help him on with his rubbers so that he could go out for a much-coveted hour of play with a new toy. I had been so much absorbed in my book that, in a dumb misery, the little Zulu had wandered about the prison-like limitations of the only language he knows.

He had tried to think of some " nice " way to attract my attention, feeling with an instinctively courteous impulse the ugliness of the only phrase which was familiar to him; and then, helplessly, he had blurted it out just as we had allowed him to learn it, and because he had been blamed for it, his hour of play had been clouded.

Worse, far worse than this temporary misfortune, he had taken another step into the fatal path of a bad habit. Another blow had been added to those which are steadily shaping his responsive little heart to a mood of despairing certainty of being always blamed by adults. By the time he is ten this certainty will have had, in all probability, one of two irrevocable results. Either he will be the tragically shy, bashful little boy we all know, who, through his anguish of self-consciousness, belies his real character pitiably and grotesquely ; or he will be the other extreme, the brazen, calloused small boy, who does not care how much he is blamed, and takes good care that there shall be plenty of cause for it.

In either case he himself will suffer from injustice and misunderstanding of his real character, and he will add another one to the already crushingly large majority among our boys and girls who, doomed themselves by adult neglect to primitive and ungracious speech, revenge themselves unconsciously on society by cherishing a tradition of roughness and curtness. This, of course, makes life unhappy for the occasional child brought up with another tradition. Our adult attitude towards this condition has been curiously like that of the wiseacres a century ago, who predicted dire results of unhappiness if any of the poor were educated, because it would " set them apart from their natural associates," make them " queer " and " different." We feebly admit that it is better for our children to be brutal than to be " different "; as if the only way to avoid ridicule and to attain happiness were to be a safe shade ruder and more ignorant than your associates, and as if there were no way to be natural and unaffected except by being unendurable. We train children to be what they are, and then lay upon this involuntary Zuluism of theirs the blame for our continuing so to train the next generation after them.

For all my remorse I did not try to apologize to Jack the affair was rather too complicated for a four year old brain to understand. I trusted to his blessedly short baby-memory, told him a funny story, gave him a cookie, and sent him laughing and wriggling with animal spirits out to play again. Then I went on thinking. My anthropological friend had started me along a path of reasoning which led to many unexpected conclusions. The cocksure adults in our family had been so positive that Jack, " like all children, is a queer mixture." What was queer I saw it now was a mixture that Jack was not responsible for : the unnatural mixture of his gentle, sensitive, " civilized " little natural character and the Zulu language of blunt, curt, inflexible phrases, to which our unthinking carelessness had condemned him.

And Jack is not the only one. His case is striking because it is extreme, but in this new light it seemed to me that none of the little children I knew, even those who are being cared for by their own mothers, are getting a fair chance. Do their mothers, do I myself in speaking to my much-loved little ones, ever think of softening the thousand little daily frictions and contacts between our personalities by anything remotely resembling the pleasant expressions of ordinary well-bred intercourse. What do I say, for instance, to my baby girl if her chair stands in the way of a door I wish to shut. I say, gently perhaps in manner, but in a phrase of autocratic and absolute command, such as I would never dream of using towards anyone else : " Your chair is in the way, dear. Get up and move it." Why should I not say to her, as I would to any acquaintance :

May I trouble you to move back just a little? " or " Would you mind moving your chair a trifle? " For I am much troubled and distressed when, in her turn, my little girl says to her grandmother: " Your chair is on my dolly's skirt. Get up ! " Even if with a wary eye to arbitrary, rule-of-thumb commands about the use of the only two polite words she knows, she adds a dry, impatient, "Please," and yet where did she learn that phrase and accent if not from some request of mine to her?

Now, anyone who has learned a foreign language knows that it is by infinite repetition that a new phrase is so embedded in the memory as to occur instinctively at a given circumstance. Learning it by heart is not enough. It must be used, and used over and over again in the appropriate circumstances before it becomes automatic. All my foreign friends confirm my own experience that the most painful part of speaking a language imperfectly is the de-pressing certainty that one's lack of fluency is constantly making one seem discourteous and appear at a disadvantage. It is not enough that Jack, several times a day, shall overhear his mother using good-humored and urbane turns of expression to her adult callers, or even to his father and other members of the family, if he is lucky enough to have a family who habitually speak to each other like civilized beings. The phrases which are stamped on his mind are those which are addressed to him. Ought he not to bear over and over again a rich variety of the quaint, mannerly phrases which should make our lives (though they may be no more morally estimable) so much more gracious than that of Maida's sister's janitor husband?

Why should not the little child, when he wishes to ask a favor of an adult (to continue taking the incident of Jack's rubbers as typical), why should he not find rising readily to his lips such simple, familiar expressions as " Would it bother you too much to do so-and-so for me? " or " Excuse me, may I trouble you to do so-and-so? " or " Won't you please do so-and-so? " or, in circumstances slightly different, "Would you mind my doing so-and-so?" or " Wouldn't it be nice if we did so-and-so? " or "Wouldn't you like to do so-and-so? " These are not stilted, affected circumlocutions, but the common, everyday expressions of friendly conversations. To teach the little child to use them instinctively and naturally should be as much taken for granted as to teach him to keep his face clean. Neither action can lay claim to any lofty, ethical value beyond that of a comely, becoming, suitable garb, which has, so all of us can testify, an influence on life out of all proportion to its apparent importance. It is simply part of the natural birthright of childhood, and not at all a " dancing-school " training for home-life or a return to eighteenth-century stiffness and formality. There is no need for a little child to rehearse set salutations for strangers, since there should be in his quiet baby-life but few occasions for using these. But the simple phrases which enable him to move easily and naturally, without appearing at a disadvantage, in the ordinary circumstances of his ordinary life, are as commonplace and essential as comfortable, well-fitting clothes, which enable him to move easily and naturally about a room. The difficulty, of course, lies in the fact that no amount of money can buy for a child an outfit of this language of civilized intercourse. Nothing but incessant intercourse with civilized beings can rescue him from linguistic Zululand.

We cannot defend ourselves against this charge of neglect by contending that it is thought and feeling which determine language, and not language which determines thought and feeling, for there are the learned and scientific anthropologists with their deep knowledge of the processes of the human brain and their definite proof that Ianguage is so vital an element in life that there are whole races of men whose minds, generation after generation, never rise to their innate capacity, but are cramped and stunted by the insufficience of their medium of expression. Just as there may be language without thought but not thought without language, so there may be surface courtesy without real kindness of heart; but real kindness of heart is often choked back from development by the lack of a habit of easily expressive speech.

It is, moreover, likely that there is here, as so often, an important reflex action from the outer manifestation upon the inner impulse. Professor William James tells us with all the authority of a great scientist, that willfully to whistle gayly when we feel gloomy will actually make us feel more cheerful. All of us know that when we are freshly attired in clean, comely garments, it is easier to be gracious and at ease than when we are muddy or ragged. Does it not seem reasonable that a fixed habit of wearing that other comely garb of courteous, flexible speech would in the case of the child, as of the adult, make it much harder for savage and Zulu-like impulses to reach expression? In other words, the habit of good or bad speech is not only important in itself as a means of expressing truth-fully the character of the speaker, but is vital be-cause it exercises a real influence on the formation of character. It seems possible that there will be actually less goodness of heart in older life if in early childhood the budding aspirations towards it find no fit means of expression. Those embryonic impulses, hardly recognizable at first and always wholly un-self-conscious, if they encounter obstacles, such as misunderstanding and the probability of appearing ridiculous, may never again in the lifetime of that individual have any but a spasmodically galvanized and intermittent existence.

The vital point which we are too apt to overlook is that this irrevocable mark may be (and probably is) set on the individual at a very early age, at the time of the first appearance of the first manifestation of the universal human impulse towards civilization. The bud on a tiny year-old apple-tree is only a little knot of brown fiber, not so large as one's finger-tip, but if it be broken off no power on earth will ever enable that tree to put out a branch again at that spot.

Nor do the little ones need only a more adequate vocabulary of courtesy, a command of those words which are in daily family intercourse what cushions and springs are in travel,—" shock-absorbers " the automobile-furnishers fitly dub them. They need quite as acutely a richer, more flexible, and more copious general vocabulary ; and although their school-training is supposed to give them this, there is no point in which the system of public instruction more lamentably and notoriously breaks down. Nor is this altogether to be wondered at. In undertaking to give the child a command of language the school really undertakes an enterprise for which it is not fitted. Language can only be acquired by living with and in it. The child's arithmetic reflects his teacher. His speech reflects his mother. The school, in the nature of things, does not have the child long enough and cannot give to conversation a large enough proportion even of the short time it does have him. As a matter of fact, he is not allowed to talk much at school, and since it is only by incessant and copious use of words that a command of them can be acquired, he must learn at home, or not at all, whatever fluency and accuracy and comeliness of speech he is ever to attain. What is more, nobody would profit more than his mother by his capacity adequately to express himself. For she can competently deal with him only if she understands him. Fully to understand children would mean in most cases a solution of all the difficulties of their training; and one enormous help towards understanding them is the power on their part accurately to express themselves. Many times we punish or blame them, or at the least form an unjust estimate of their character, from a speech or act, which, if they were able to explain themselves, we would see from quite a different angle. Of course, they never can wholly explain themselves, because, like the rest of us, they have little idea of why they do things. Most adult misunderstandings come from this incapacity for self-analysis. But the clear thinking, which is the first step towards self-comprehension and self-explanation, can only exist in connection with a command of a clear medium of expression. It is, there-fore, perhaps not too much to say that of all the services which we try to render to the children under our charge none should take higher rank or call out more fully our most ardent and ingenious efforts than the attempt to free them, as soon as possible, from the prison of dumbness, from the limbo of inarticulateness.

For the ordinary mother, with no training in the teaching of English, with no time to learn new methods, who must just do the best she can with the resources at her command, there is perhaps no better expedient to adopt than to talk with the child. Indeed, this is perhaps the best expedient of all for anyone. If, without taking special thought, the mother is already doing this, she is not an ordinary mother, but a very extraordinarily intelligent one, who can give all the rest of us pointers on her profession for most of us, if we stop to consider the way in which the days and weeks really pass in our homes, will find that we almost never take the time to talk with the children. We talk at them enough, in all conscience, but we are apt, if there are no commands or suggestions to be made, to leave them to themselves and to wash our conversational hands of them. We all almost without exception not only do not tall with the children, but we have an almost irresistible impulse to cut them short when they try to talk with us. The phrases with which we evade conversation with them are worn threadbare with much use. "Don't interrupt, dear." " No, Mother can't talk to you now." " Don't you see I'm busy and can't listen now." " Run into the kitchen and tell Bridget about it." " Oh, do stop that incessant chatter." Or if we do not go so far as this, we adopt the other evasion of the absent ear, the wandering eye, the meaningless comments thrown in at random, "Is that so? " "Well!" "Did you?" and very often, to end up with, the confession extorted by a point-blank question, " Why, dear, to tell the truth, I haven't been paying very much attention to what you were saying. What was it all about? " If a mother lives who has not gone through this process a hundred times, I should like to meet her.

But we must all confess that this is not the best way to encourage the careful and accurate use of language. The child's long, rambling talks are not especially interesting or pointed, but his impulse to talk, even if incoherently, is the best, the only tool we have to use in the improvement of his speech. If we start with this impulse and use it wisely we can go far. Those who have not tried really to converse reasonably and sensibly with a child about topics which naturally interest him can have no idea of how eager he is to express himself, how he welcomes interest in his remarks, and expands to fluency under sympathetic attention. Because he cares about what he is saying, he tries hard to say it so that he will be understood and heeded, and he seizes willingly on suggestions which seem to help him. The breathless and excited narration of the events of a game of hide-and-seek or of baseball or merely of an afternoon spent in "playing house" can be made, if the mother is tactful in her questionings and promptings, an exercise in coherence, in sequence, in vividness, and accuracy of phrase, the value of which no teacher of English could hope to equal. And to hear and to share in good table-talk is perhaps a greater aid in learning a language than can be obtained in any other way.