Word Of Magic

[Ilona Brownson]

Magicwords are phrases used in fantasy fiction or by stage magicians. Frequently such words are presented as being part of a divine, adamic, or other secret or empowered language. Certain comic book heroes use magic words to activate their powers. Magic words are also used as Easter eggs or cheats in computer games, other software, and operating systems. (For example, the words xyzzy, plugh, and plover were magic words in the classic computer adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure.)

Craig Conley, a scholar of magic, writes that the magic words used by conjurers may originate from "pseudo-Latin phrases, nonsense syllables, or esoteric terms from religious antiquity", but that what they have in common is "language as an instrument of creation".[10]

While the acquisition of referential speech may involve children's producing words only after they have gained some concept of their referents, the acquisition of politeness routines usually involves an intervening adult who insists the child produce a form even if the child does not yet recognize the requirements of the social situation and may not be able to analyze the formula linguistically.

I\u2019m writing today\u2019s newsletter with both my kids home from camp with some kind of sniffly virus (hopefully just a cold and not THAT OTHER THING), and honestly, I\u2019m not feeling so great myself. So please bear with me.

A few weeks ago, my family traveled to San Diego to visit extended family, and one moment in particular has stuck with me. We were on the plane to JFK, sitting a few rows from the back of a Boeing 737. A flight attendant walked from the front to the back of the plane and gave out snacks. When he handed pretzels to my 8-year-old, she said \u201Cthank you!\u201D I was thrilled, because let me tell you, it has taken YEARS to get her to say \u201Cplease\u201D and \u201Cthank you\u201D without a prompt from my end. (Sometimes, I still have to give one.)

The flight attendant crouched down and quietly said to me, \u201CI want you to know that your children are the first kids \u2014 and in fact, among the first people at all \u2014 to say thank you to me out of the 150 people I served before you. Thank you for raising them well.\u201D He then handed me a few kids\u2019 snack packs, the ones you usually pay for, and said he hoped that we enjoyed them.

I was, as you can imagine, floored. At first, sure, I felt a pang of pride \u2014 yay, my kids did good! (I know this anecdote could come across as a humble-brag \u2014 Look how awesome my kids are! \u2014 so I want to emphasize to you again that my kids have NOT said \u201Cplease\u201D and \u201Cthank you\u201D in about 4 million other situations in which they should have.) Then, however, I felt sad. Why was it that so few people thanked him? Including the adults? What does this say about the state of our country? Why is it so damned hard for kids (nay, all of us) to be polite?

As I often do when I start pondering a topic, I hunted for some science. That\u2019s when I discovered the research of Boston University psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason, who has studied these exact questions. (She is delightful; watch this 4-minute interview with her on PBS.) Berko Gleason\u2019s work sheds light on why it\u2019s so hard for kids to learn to be polite \u2014 and what we should be doing to nudge our kids in the right direction.

First, I think it\u2019s important to remember that politeness rituals are 100% learned and 0% innate. Sure, altruism might be hard-wired, but the details of what to say and do in specific social situations is not. And learning any new skill takes practice.

But politeness is especially tough \u2014 and there are a few reasons why. Consider how parents (and adults in general) typically teach kids language: We usually give them clues to help them grasp a word\u2019s meaning. We see a dog while we\u2019re walking outside and point to it and say \u201CLook at that dog! Isn\u2019t he a cute dog? What a nice dog!\u201D We use visual prompts, and we use the word we\u2019re trying to teach in multiple ways in different kinds of sentences. This is what\u2019s called \u201Creferential language,\u201D because it\u2019s language that refers to something. (In this case, the dog.)

This is not the approach we typically take when we teach kids to say \u201Cplease\u201D and \u201Cthank you.\u201D When we teach kids these phrases, we don\u2019t usually help them understand what they mean with context, nor explain why we are asking them to say them \u2014 we just say things like \u201CSay please,\u201D \u201CWhat do you say?\u201D or \u201CWhat\u2019s the magic word?\u201D As Berko Gleason and her colleagues explained in a 1984 paper:

In other words, when we encourage kids to say polite things, we often do not give them the context or meaning they need to grasp why they are being asked to say it. We usually don\u2019t sit them down and say, \u201CHey, sweetie, let me teach you about the word please.\u201D We just prompt them to say it in various situations and hope, one day, they will learn to understand why and generalize our expectations.

Further evidence that young kids don\u2019t really know what \u201Cplease\u201D and \u201Cthank you\u201D mean comes from a small study conducted by Berko Gleason and her colleague Esther Blank Greif in 1980. (Yes, these studies are old, but they are the seminal studies on the topic.) They invited 22 children between the ages of two and five into their lab and videotaped them as they each played with their parents. At the end of the session, a researcher came into the room and gave the child a gift. The researchers recorded and analyzed what the children said to the gift-giver, if anything, as well as what the parents said to their kids.

They found that the kids spontaneously said \u201Cthank you\u201D to the gift-giver only 7 percent of the time (see? Your kids aren\u2019t the only ones), but that 51 percent of the parents then prompted them to do so, usually by saying something like \u201CWhat do you say?\u201D or \u201CSay thank you.\u201D The researchers observed, too, that the kids rarely said \u201Cthank you\u201D in their own words, which was a sign that the kids probably had little grasp of what the words meant. As they wrote in the paper:

None of the children varied the adults' form or attempted to express their appreciation in their own words. No child said, for instance, \u201Cthanks a lot,\u201D and there was no evidence of the children adding to their expressions of appreciation such things as \u201CThank you, it was really nice of you to give me this toy.\u201D In general, the children performed the routine without elaboration in the form presented to them, without giving evidence that they knew, in any sense, what the routine meant.

Another reason kids struggle with politeness words is that, typically, children don\u2019t have any desire to say them. When you say \u201Cmy foot hurts,\u201D it\u2019s because your foot hurts and you want to tell someone, Berko Gleason said. When you say \u201CThis book was so good,\u201D it\u2019s because you loved the book and you want to share the sentiment. But usually, kids do not have an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness that drives them to want to say \u201Cthank you,\u201D Berko Gleason told me. \u201CYou don't want to say \u2018thank you\u2019 because thankfulness is welling up in you,\u201D she explained. \u201CIt's performative \u2014 it's something that you have to do at a certain occasion.\u201D And it\u2019s much harder to get kids to say things because you want them said than if they really want to say them. (Yes, sometimes, we can feel thankful and want to say \u201Cthank you.\u201D But I\u2019d venture that 99 percent of the time we say \u201Cthank you,\u201D we are not doing it because we feel overwhelmed with gratitude.)

To summarize, kids have trouble learning polite phrases for a number of reasons: We don\u2019t do a good job of teaching kids their meaning; it\u2019s hard for kids to predict when to say them; and the phrases don\u2019t reflect any kind of inner desire to say them. (By the way, these same factors are at play when kids are learning \u2014 or shall I say failing to learn? \u2014 to say \u201CI\u2019m sorry.\u201D) No wonder my kids needed prompts every day at the dinner table FOR YEARS before they started saying \u201Cplease\u201D and \u201Cthank you\u201D on their own.

With any conversation about politeness, I also think it\u2019s crucial to address gender stereotypes. I encourage both my son and daughter to be polite \u2014 to say \u201Cplease\u201D and \u201Cthank you\u201D when it\u2019s appropriate, because I think it\u2019s respectful. But I\u2019m also sensitive to the fact that our culture sends messages to girls that they are supposed to be sweet and docile and overly polite, and I push hard against those expectations. Among other things, I think it\u2019s important to tell kids that politeness is different from assertiveness. You can be respectful of others while also being a leader and holding your ground and fighting for what you want and need and believe in. These things can absolutely co-exist.

On that note, in her research, Berko Gleason did not find that parents prompt girls to be polite more than they prompt boys to be polite. So there is no evidence of a difference in socialization practices on that front, at least not in her research. But she does find that fathers tend to be less polite than mothers \u2014 perhaps an unsurprising finding given the gender stereotypes, but an important difference that kids notice and learn from. If a girls sees her mom being more polite than her dad, she might infer that girls are expected to be more polite than boys are. Likewise, a boy will infer from this observation that boys don\u2019t need to be as polite as girls.

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