This half-playful, half-serious scrutiny of word-sounds leads to the attempt to find by analysis and analogy a familiar meaning in strange words. For example, a little boy. about four years old heard his mother speak of nurse's "neuralgia," from which she had been suffering some time. He therefore exclaimed, "I don't think it's neuralgia, I call it old ralgia." A child called his doll "Shakespeare," because its spearlike legs could be shaken. Another child explained the "master" which he prefixed to his name by saying he was master of his dog. A little girl in her third year called anchovies "ham-chovies," mermaid "worm-maid," whirlwind "world-wind," gnomes "no-mans" (Un-menschen), seeming to take pleasure in imparting some familiar element into the strange jumble of word-sound that beset her ear.
This quasi-punning transformation of words is curiously like what may be called folk-derivation, when a word is altered so as to be made to appear significant and suitable for its purpose, as in the oft-quoted form "beef-eater" (corruption of buffetier, from buffet, sideboard), and in the form "crayfish" (from French écrevisse or O. H. German Krebiz), where the attempt to suit the form to the thing is still more apparent.The other form of the word, "crawfish," seems a still more ingenious example of folk etymology. When, for example, a boy calls a holiday a "hollorday," because it is a day "to hollo in," we may say that he is reflecting the process by which peoples alter the forms of words, giving them a perfectly fanciful etymology, so as to make them seem to fit their objects. Some children carry out such transformation and invention of derivation on a large scale, often resorting to pretty myth, as when the butterflies are said to make butter or to eat butter, grasshoppers to give grass, honeysuckles to yield all the honey, and so forth.[1]
A child will even go further, and, prying into the forms of gender, create an explanatory myth which may dimly reflect the ancient myths of peoples which lay at the root of these distinctions of gender. Thus a little boy, aged five years and three months, who had learned German and Italian, as well as English, was much troubled about the gender of the sun and moon. So he set about myth-making on this wise: "I suppose people[2] think the sun is the husband, the moon is the wife, and all the stars the little children, and Jupiter the maid."
One other characteristic feature in the child's attitude toward words must be touched on, because it is, in a manner, the opposite of the impulse to tamper with words just dealt with. A child is
