Bowl Hat

22 Months: “Kitten is wearing a bowl hat.”

A few months before my daughter turned two, a hungry kitten showed up at my house and… well, I just couldn’t turn her away. I picked her up in my arms and when I opened my mouth to say, “You’ll stay with us until we find you another home,” something else entirely came out: “You’re my kitten now.”

And she was. But it wasn’t long before the new feline, Ophelia, hit puberty and turned into a yowling nightmare of an animal, lifting her butt and tail into the air and begging for some virile tomcat to hear her cries and come to save her from her hormones. I couldn’t tolerate the idea of hearing her wail for even one day longer, so I had her spayed the day after she went into heat for the first time.

Like many cats, Ophelia decided that the strange bits of thread that the vet had sewn onto her belly just weren’t supposed to be there, and set to work quickly ripping them out one-by-one. There was only one solution to this problem: the Cone of Shame.

It has many names. I found out at the time that vets call it an Elizabethan collar, after those ugly ruffs that nobles wore during the Elizabethan era. It’s also called a pet cone, an e-collar (I have no clue what the E stands for), and a pet lamp shade.

My daughter, of course, quickly invented her own term for it: “bowl hat.”

                                        

Creative language is a funny thing because it provides these little insights into how we ever invented language in the first place. We take terms that we know and we combine, abbreviate, and synthesize them to coin little neologisms for the ever-expanding, ever-evolving number of people, thoughts, and things that make up the world around us.

We’re not the only ones who do this. Chimps often come up with similar words and phrases when introduced to human language. At the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, a group of chimps who used sign language quickly adapted it to name and specify some of their favorite people and things. Watermelon became “drink fruit.” Orange became “smell fruit.” Radishes (clearly not a favorite among our perpetual-toddler cousins) were dubbed, “cry hurt food.”

Noam Chomsky, the philosopher-scientist-linguist-activist who never fails to make me feel like an underachiever, said that we’re different, even from an early age. Even the youngest human toddlers (but not chimps or any of our other evolutionary cousins!) have a little portion of the left side of their brain that can process sentence structure and grammar, in ways that even the smartest chimps can’t. So, while “bowl-hat” is a phrase that an ape might coin, the sentence, “Kitten is wearing a bowl-hat,” is not.

From the get-go, complex language is programmed into our brains, and even kids who aren’t old enough to use it correctly-- and people who never develop the ability to use spoken language—have that special human spark somewhere inside that grants the gift  of language. Coining the phrase “bowl-hat” is just the very beginning.