Saturday, March 3, 2012

Is "Oy" a word? Discuss.

Nadav, as we may have mentioned before, is verbally limited. Not that he's limited in letting us know what he wants, just that he prefers not to use a commonly recognized language to do so. As Uncle Jonathan and I discussed over Shabbat, perhaps this is because he heard English, he heard Hebrew, he thought about it, and decided "Eh, let's just keep on grunting."

He has a handful of words:

"Addy" = Daddy
"Ode" (not as in a Grecian Urn, but as in "more") = always said in multiples "odeodeodoeodeodeode"
"Die" (not as in Another Day, but as in "enough!")
"Mmmm" (not "Mommy this meal is so tasty," but as the first syllable in "mayim," not Bialik, but water.) Donny thinks he's just turning the "w" from "water" upside down.
"Allah" (not as in God, but as in Ariella and/or Yaakov)
"NNNNN" = everything else

And after he carefully holds his plate, considers it for a moment, then chucks it to the floor, he is absolutely flabbergasted, shocked and distressed that his plate is now on the floor. So he responds to this catastrophic set of circumstances using the words that generations of our people have used to express vexation:

"Oyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy."

So I ask, Does this count as a word?

3 comments:

MOMZWIFEOFDADZ said...

Oy, does it ever count as a word. It says volumes. Oy, he is so cute.

Kathleen said...

Sure it counts as a word! I bet he sounds cute saying it too (which is good that he's so cute since he tends to chuck his food on the floor):)

Eliana said...

Give him extra credit for using "oy" appropriately! (and now he's trilingual b/c that is actually Yiddish)