Fog

It's extraordinary how kids learn themselves the rightness or wrongness of language.

No dictionary or grammar textbook there, and no blind rote learning. Yet children catch the essence of how languages should work. Obviously they make up new words like mouses, but not mice.

No sentence is too trivial or too boring if we spend time to expand the words with kids. I took a day off yesterday to join my daughter's school outing to Kadoorie Farm. The weather was so-so. "Look. Daddy, the mountain is moldy," Jasmine concluded.

I followed her finger and looked out of the car window. I couldn't see the top of the mountain. I knew what she meant. "Yes. Doesn't it look like the scraps of our bug box where the mealworm and beetle live? The scraps turn moldy. You might call the weather foggy, though."

To those of us who speak Chinese, it is no less an example of homophone. Moldy and foggy sounds alike in Chinese. Both words fall under the umbrella of "rain" in Chinese characters, too. Common sense would have told me to give a lecture on the Chinese characters. But common sense has no place in children's curiosity and never has.

My daughter dropped the word for the foggy weather, and then told me, "In fact, dad, the more I look at the mountain, the more it looks like someone behind the bridal veil."