His foolish talk.

The parent does not even know how to talk to his own Child.  The Child is yearning to acquire a correct and dignified mode of expression.  The parent says: “Did ums.  Did naughty table hurt ickle tootsie pootsies?  Baby say: ‘’Oo naughty table.  Me no love ’oo.’”

The Child despairs of ever learning English.  What should we think ourselves were we to join a French class, and were the Instructor to commence talking to us French of this description?  What the Child, according to the gentleman from Cambridge, says to itself is,

“Oh for one hour’s intelligent conversation with a human being who can talk the language.”

Will not the young gentleman from Cambridge descend to detail?  Will he not give us a specimen dialogue?

A celebrated lady writer, who has made herself the mouthpiece of feminine indignation against male stupidity, took up the cudgels a little while ago on behalf of Mrs. Caudle.  She admitted Mrs. Caudle appeared to be a somewhat foolish lady.  “But what had Caudle ever done to improve Mrs. Caudle’s mind?”  Had he ever sought, with intelligent illuminating conversation, to direct her thoughts towards other topics than lent umbrellas and red-headed minxes?

It is my complaint against so many of our teachers.  They scold us for what we do, but so rarely tell us what we ought to do.  Tell me how to talk to my baby, and I am willing to try.  It is not as if I took a personal pride in the phrase: “Did ums.”  I did not even invent it.  I found it, so to speak, when I got here, and my experience is that it soothes the Child.  When he is howling, and I say “Did ums” with sympathetic intonation, he stops crying.  Possibly enough it is astonishment at the ineptitude of the remark that silences him.  Maybe it is that minor troubles are lost sight of face to face with the reflection that this is the sort of father with which fate has provided him.  But may not even this be useful to him?  He has got to meet with stupid people in the world.  Let him begin by contemplating me.  It will make things easier for him later on.  I put forward the idea in the hope of comforting the young gentleman from Cambridge.

We injure the health of the Child by enforcing on it silence.  We have a stupid formula that children should be seen and not heard.  We deny it exercise to its lungs.  We discourage its natural and laudable curiosity by telling it not to worry us—not to ask so many questions.

Won’t somebody lend the young gentleman from Cambridge a small and healthy child just for a week or so, and let the bargain be that he lives with it all the time?  The young gentleman from Cambridge thinks, when we call up the stairs to say that if we hear another sound from the nursery during the next two hours we will come up and do things to that Child the mere thought of which should appal it, that is silencing the Child.  It does not occur to him that two minutes later that Child is yelling again at the top of its voice, having forgotten all we ever said.