My son had a cutesy affectation when he spoke, or, more specifically, when he was learning to speak our American English: he tended to end words with the hard "--dee" sound. "Shark" would become "shark-dee"; truck became "truck-dee", jump-dee.
And, maybe-not-so-strangely, the dual syllable word "waffle" became "waff-dee."
I wanted to bring this up now because now I have another young primate in my house learning our American English, and we feed this primate in the same way we fed our other young language-learning primate: plenty of waffles.
My daughter---possibly because she's a second-born, possibly because she's a girl---is more advanced than my son was language-wise at same aged points, but she also has her own affectations. She doesn't add the suffix "--dee" to words, and for her, waffle isn't "waff-dee", it's "faffle."
Other language acquisition developments are bittersweet, like when kids stop saying things in the adorably incorrect ways that they do and resemble the rest of us. I remember when my son stopped saying "blutter-fy" for butterfly. And, very recently, my daughter had been saying "kittle-ly" for "kitty," a verbal habit that had become beloved, and is now sadly corrected.
I'm not sure whether "blutter-fy" or "kittle-ly" is more adorable, but their disappearance augers in the reality of maturation.
And parents wistfully grip those memories...
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