Ways With Words

I was very intrigued by the "ways with words" in Trackton and Roadville, most likely because I have grown up in a very different environment. Our group presented on the ways children are brought up in Trackton, and how their speech and interaction with adults are emerging. Basically, children in Trackton are brought up by a whole community, not just by their parents. Members of the community interact with babies in various ways - they hold them, cuddle them, carry them around, and, most importantly, talk to them. However, the talking is not deliberately aimed at teaching the children how to talk. Heath comments that “Trackton adults believe a baby ‘comes up’ as a talker; adults cannot make babies talk” (75). In other words, by talking to the babies adults sort of initiate the conversation, and it's up to the baby to keep up when he or she finally starts talking. This ties in with another important belief of Trackton's adults: children need to learn how to talk in order to survive, so the earlier they start talking, the better off they would be later. This belief also perpetuates all sorts of activities adults and children engage in. For example, adults would deliberately provoke children, either verbally or non-verbally, to see how they would get out of the situation. Crying and screaming would not count as ways out. Such activities are performed with both boys and girls, and their purpose is to sort of toughen them up, to get them prepared to the life in the big world. So..... even though it sounds strange, it might actually serve a purpose. I guess it goes hand in hand with the view of the world as something unpredictable and dangerous, where you have to be aggressive and constantly be on your toes, ready to counteract whatever is being thrown at you. I don't necessarily subscribe to this view of the world... what good does it do a person to constantly be on the defensive? Maybe it's just me and the way I was raised.