Personified.

I can understand how it might benefit a kid to inculcate their imaginations with somewhat cartoonish figures – people in children’s books are much more colorful and caricatured than their three-dimensional counterparts, and toymakers seem to find a degree of alien patina irresistible. Perhaps the imagery imbues our younger versions with a psychologically-constructive openness that frolicks in the face of an otherwise hostile world. I'm sure the likes of Peter Singer rejoice when animals are anthropomorphized to inspire empathy among their prospective masters and oppressors.

But in other cases, the motivation behind some of these illustrations and playthings is not immediately obvious. Why do the creators of most of my daughter’s books feel like it’s necessary to give smiles, wide-eyes, and blushing cheeks to the sun or a grouping of cumulus clouds? What value is there in making unworldly balls of flaming gases so amicable and adorable? I don’t expect my daughter to have an interaction with the sun (or any of the other stars, for that matter) in which a cold, arms-length distrust would be a gross disservice. The same goes for clouds that stare out at her with a rosy-red complexion and long eyelashes. (I’m not all that concerned that she’ll develop an unhealthy, introverted ambivalence to mundane meteorological fixtures.)

Today I noticed that Josephine has a large toy tape measurer. It’s misshapen, rectangular and orange – not all that unusual for child-like replicas of real-life objects. However, Fisher-Price decided to endow the tape measurer with eyes. And to be honest, that’s not all that offensive, even though I’d be materially disturbed to buy anything from Home Depot and find it had eyes after peeling back the packaging. The real oddity of this toy tape measurer is its over-sized cowboy boots. Is it just that I’m totally oblivious to some indisputable value in portraying common household tools as bronc-busting, gun-slinging wayfarers? For what exactly does that prepare our children?

It gets you thinking about the many cars that have been given faces and personalities (and all the ebullient films about them). Herbie, all the sequals and remakes of the Love Bug franchise, Knight Rider, the Pixar animated movie Cars. Maybe it's an obvious (and obviously conspiratorial) point to say these are the building blocks of "customer delight" so well-ingrained in our nascent consumers.

How to take up a new language.

Language, like most things, is at its crystalline best when it’s unkempt, as though a history of bloodletting and less tactile persuasion had pooled at our feet with little regard for cognitive conveniences like structure, consistency, or clarity. Rustic and disorderly, like an old-fashioned peasant insurrection. Like a good stew. Like the universe, which sniffles at science and mere rationality as they throw paper airplanes at the sun. Of course, there is conjugation and syntax and no mild deficit of grammatical parameters for how we communicate, but I tend to favor the odd bits and anomalies.

I’ve been reminded of this resplendent disorder as I listen to our daughter cling to and rehearse every verb she hears from us that includes the word “up.” They’re surprisingly common, and so far, her repertoire includes usage such as …

The raccoon is stuck up in the tree.
Clean up the food I dropped on the floor.
Pick up the screwdriver and hand it to me.
Snap up my nightgown.

Her distinctive tendency towards the imperative aside, isn’t “up” completely unnecessary in these sorts of sentences? There’s one exception above, but for the others: wouldn’t they retain all their meaning without the embellishment? Josephine knows little English (and to be clear, she’s nowhere close to speaking the above sentences verbatim), yet one of the first things onto which she has latched is hollow and ineffectual. That's feeble economizing for someone with so little weight to throw around -- and twenty-two months seems too young for shadow boxing. Then again, maybe it’s the most prescient time for it, saving her best for opponents of genuine substance.

Isn’t there something wonderful in the color and texture added by these two humble characters, U & P? A little “rhetorical flourish” that is inexplicable and mystical.