'Baby Talk' Is Spreading

Northern Advocate, 3 June 1947, Page 4

'Baby Talk' Is Spreading

(Bv a New York Correspondent)

People who say “ta ta” when they mean “good-bye” are addicts ot Hypocorism, better known as baby talk. The odd thing about baby talk is that it is usually an adult failing. Babies are taught it.

Wozzit mummy’s honey pumpkin? Does its ickle tootsy wootsy hurty wurty? Wouldnms like go nice ta ta?

Nursery expressions such as these are giving America the reputation of being one of the world's outstanding baby-talking nations. A professor who had not left his specksie weeksies at home had a good deal to say about baby talk ihypocorlsm is the technical word for it) in a lecture to the Modern Languages Association of America in Washington. He was Dr Allen Walker Read of Columbia University’s Department of English, who denounced the insidious growth of .sugary talk. Exponents cf baby talk, he said, were more often grown-ups than babies—

While he accused Britons of babying the King’s English, much more than Americans did, Dr Read accused Americans of practising six major forms of baby talk. Yet some of hie best illustrations of these six forms came from overseas sources —even from the writings of George Bernard Shaw and Jonathan Swift. SIX CLASSIFICATIONS

Here are Dr Read’s six classifications: —

First, baby talk which the adults teach their children. Dr Read quoted lexicographer Noah Webster of this subject: “Silly language called ‘baby talk’ into which mest people are initiated in infancy often breaks out in discoui’se at the age cf 40 and makes r. man appear very ridiculous. A boy of six may be taught to speak as correctly as Cicero did before the Roman Senate.”

Secondly, baby talk which grownups use in conversation with their dogs and other pets. Dr Read quoted from Shaw’s “Androcles and the Lion,” where Androcles says, “Didum get an awful thorn in urn's tootsums wootsums ”

Thirdly, the cloying words with which one lover talks to another. Dr Read leaped upon the sweet nothings addressed by Jonathan Swift to his Stella and noted that Swift was addicted to “whisper dispers” at the very time, in 1712, when he was writing his “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.” IN ADVERTISING Fourthly, baby talk in advertising. Dr Read quoted samples from printed and radio advertising, including “Fwitty Baby Shoppe,” cereals called “Lishus" and “Bekus Fuddyi” and underwear called “Woffies.” The other two classifications were the baby talk of adults used in a wheedling spirit, and baby talk used for sarcastic and satirical effect. Dr Read mentions Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Booth Tarkington, and D. H. Lawrence as baby-talk writers. He emphasised that children comprised the only population group not guiltv of baby talk unless it is instilled into them. He made it clear that. a child would learn the purest English if it were, delivered to him straight.