On Thu, 25 Jan 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> >
> > My plan for our as-yet hypothetical child(ren) is to answer "why?" with an
> > excrutiatingly exacting answer (and a trip to the library or web if
> > necessary). When I do that to Susan she usually bops me on the head.
> >
> > Anyone have annecdotes about trying that approach with kids?
> >
> > Joshua
>
> Worked for my parents..... "look it up" was a mantra at our house.
> My parents even spent several hundreds of dollars on encyclopedias for
> home to keep up with their statement as we got older :-)
After my sister and I both had had some German and some Latin, we
discovered very quickly that it was a bad idea to ask the meaning of a
word within earshot of our mother. While "look it up" had been the
response a few short years earlier, she made us dissect the word and
figure out what parts of it came from what word in Latin, or what word was
cognate with it in German; and after you've gone through that 3 or 4
times, you just ask for someone to pass you the dictionary and don't even
bother asking about any definitions. (Now, if the dictionary definition
doesn't make sense for the word in the context in which you met it, then
you can have a discussion about it where you're not being asked to be an
etymologist.)
I liked asking my father stuff. He'd explain how a cyclotron worked, and
keep at it for half an hour if I had questions for that long. (And he'd
get out back issues of Scientific American if my question had to do with
an article he remembered, and we'd go over the pertinent part of the
article together.)
Julia
