“You wanna go out?” “Wanna go out!” Gage agreed excitedly. “Wanna go out. Where my neeks, Daddy?” This sentence, if reproduced phonetically, would have looked something like this: Weh ma neeks, Dah-dee? The translation was Where are my sneakers, Father? Louis was often struck by Gage’s speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter but fairly amiable way. He knew that babies make all the sounds the human voice box is capable of… the liquid trill that proves so difficult for first-year
...more
