Fleur calls me Honey. I am sure it started as parroting my wife. But, she does it now as a replacement for Dada. Well, when she wants my attention.
Fleur: Daddy.
Hoooonnneeeeeeeeeeyy!
Actually, you know what? That latter is similar in approach to how the wife calls the teen. Booooboooooooooooo!
Fleur has taken to calling the male Little People toy in the toy house “Honey” too. I need to observe the name she has for the female. Curious if she has a name yet. I am also curious if she will call other adult males Honey. (And their reaction to it.)
The first toy I noticed she named was an annoying unicorn that makes noise. We never named it because, honestly, we hoped it would disappear (burn in a fire). Fleur named it Lady. Same as a dog down the street she loves to visit.
I ponder often the psychology of names.
- They occupy space in our brains. And they seem important due to processes in the brain encoding and retrieving them.
- Our language seems built around labeling things. English has a subject and an object, both of which are “things” and the verb saying what we are doing with the things. So we need nouns to identify and distinguish between the things with greater and greater accuracy.
- I think what I like most about science is the precision I gained in thinking about what things are by developing ever increasing vocabulary about them.
- We start with physical things and move into more abstract. I call myself a technologist which is not an actual object. It is a job title with a loose and very subjective sense of duties.
Polymath Parent 