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Sat, Jan 19 2008

Six Words Are All You Need

Everyone has a six-word story, or so Smith notes (and here’s a video—some pictures must only be worth six words). Indeed: Sometimes (a lot of times) in our house, a little goes a long way. My son Charlie can talk, mostly in short phrases or single words and six words at one time from him is quite a lot.

Blue ocean, Chinese food, I know.

It’s telegraphic speech, in which a single word is connected, by fibers invisible and strong as the threads of a spider’s web, to a full cosmos of meanings. All in just six words.

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Comments

  1. Trackback
    1573 days ago
    Yes, No, Brown Noodles!

    [...] know if he’ll still like the noodles—-something like that. But being a boy of few words, it’s not so easy to talk about something that is not “black and white” and that [...]

  2. Trackback
    1574 days ago
    How Can I Talk if My Lips Don’t Move?: New Book by Tito Mukhopadhyay

    [...] a little less than six words (and sometimes many more, and whether or not your lips are moving) can get the message across. [...]

  3. By S.L.

    Sometimes the things said with the fewest words make the greatest impact. So long as our ears (and minds!) are open! Lovely post, smiling here thinking of your son’s messages. Thanks for sharing the links too. Great stuff.

  4. By Daisy

    It’s rather poetic, like Haiku, where every word or syllable has value. in the six traits writing model, this is the ultimate in Word Choice.

  5. By Robin H. Morris

    Only five

    Years ago, our son’s noises with obsessive and repetitive language was very distressing. One day he must of instinctively known just how upset I was….”no noises, go library Mommy?”
    5 words said it all
    xR

  6. By Kristina Chew, PhD

    It makes me reflect on how few words it takes to say the essentials!

  7. By Emily

    I cannot even put on a number on how many times I’ve described TH’s speech as “telegraphic.” That was until recently. And it’s still like that. These days, I think of it more as a fritzy FM radio station. In fact, I was going to do a post about that because it’s such a good description of so much of what he does–school, talking, dressing… ;)