Quetzal, Isosceles, Katydid
Are these words part of your everyday vocabulary?
To our toddler grandson, Roger, back in 2020, they certainly were. Left in my care while his mother nursed his baby sister, Sally, we played his favorite game of pretend inside a blanket fort. Ensconced beneath a thick comforter, we imagined we were safe inside his little house. Whenever he lifted a corner of the quilt, he would proudly announce that he was opening a door or a window.
To make our play a bit more exciting, I swapped the light-colored comforter for a dark blue one and suggested we were deep inside a mysterious forest. We began pretending to be frightened by the unseen creatures lurking in the shadows.
“A jaguar!” he shrieked in mock terror, before pointing toward the dark ceiling and cooing, “Look, a quetzal!”
Had I not studied Mesoamerican civilizations for my master's degree in anthropology, I might not have immediately recognized the jaguar and the quetzal as the sacred feline and avian species inhabiting the cloud forests of Central and South America. Roger, of course, knew nothing of pre-Columbian Aztec or Mayan cultures, but he had effortlessly placed both creatures in their exact natural habitat.
Next, we made rolling wave motions with the comforter, pretending to dive beneath the ocean. Expecting him to spot a generic shark or whale coming to attack us, I was delighted when he hollered with pinpoint precision, “Watch out, a beluga!” and “Yikes, an orca!”
I make no bold claims about having a genius for a grandson, but the boy absorbs language like a sponge. He listens, repeats words instantly, and—best of all—retains them in his mental vault, ready to retrieve whenever the right context arises.
One morning at the neighborhood park, his mother heard a soft bird call in the trees and whispered, “Oh, Roger, listen to the owl!”
Roger gently corrected her: “A mourning dove, Mama.”
They make a similar hooting sound, but one rarely encounters an owl in a suburban park during the daytime. Likewise, to Roger, a long-horned insect is neither a generic grasshopper nor a cricket; he correctly identifies it as a katydid. (Would you?)
Exhausted after our jungle adventures under the covers, I turned on the television to a children's educational program. Roger watched passively as the narrator asked viewers to repeat basic letters, numbers, colors, and shapes. He seemed thoroughly bored—until the image of a pointed house roof flashed on the screen, at which point he perked up and declared, “Isosceles triangle!”
His uncanny ability to absorb complex names and context even extended to modern political news. While adult pundits on television twisted their tongues trying to pronounce the last name of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, Roger pronounced it flawlessly on his first attempt after overhearing a news broadcast while playing on the rug.
Today, at four years old, Roger can reel off long, multi-syllabic dinosaur names with total ease. Perhaps many young boys his age can do the same, but to a grandmother like me, those kilometric words would not only twist my tongue—they wouldn't even register in my memory. Simply amazing!
