From the Doonesbury cartoon of 3/3/19 on baby’s first words:
(#1) Alex Doonesbury, watched by her mother, coaches her infant daughter Rosie to say mama — and is rewarded with Nevertheless, she persisted!
On the people in this strip, from Wikipedia‘s list of Doonesbury characters:
Alexandra “Alex” Doonesbury (born November 30, 1988, named September 8, 1989) – Daughter of Mike and J.J. who lived with her father and Kim, before attending and graduating from MIT (2006–2010), and holds several patents. A techie, Alex bonded with future-stepmother Kim over the computer. More or less a liberal foil for her more moderate father. She met Toggle online (March 21, 2009) but B.D., who knew both, facilitated their meeting (April 6, 2009). The two hit it off and began dating. They got engaged in early February 2012 and married in June (sequence June 11–23, 2012). On January 22, 2013 it was announced that Alex was pregnant with twins. Alex received her Ph.D. in the June 6, 2013 strip and went into labor at the ceremony in the following day’s strip. The twins are named Eli and Danny, after buddies of Toggle’s who didn’t make it home from Iraq. In the February 4, 2018, strip, it is revealed that Alex has a third child, a girl (named as Rosie in the March 3, 2019 strip).
(which is what you see above).
Earlier on this blog.
— from 4/15/09 in “The first word”:
From Dave Coverly’s Speed Bump:
(#2)
My daughter’s first word was “no”, quickly followed by “dog” and “cat”. “Hippopotamus” would have been too much to expect.
[Update 16 April: my granddaughter’s first words were (in order) “hi”, “no”, and “uh-oh”. “Hi” was used to greet someone — and request that the addressee pick her up.]
— from 5/17/10 in “Famous first words”:
A Zippy on Little Zippy’s cognitive development, including his first words:
(#3)
Stories of “baby’s first words” abound, many of them obviously tall tales, in which a baby speaks not at all for several years, then comes out with some complex, and perfectly well-formed, utterance, explaining that they hadn’t said anything before because they didn’t have anything important to say, or because they wanted to wait until they could get it right. Nice stories, but utterly implausible, since perfecting a linguistic system requires not only practice (which they might have managed in secret), but in fact practice with other people.
I think I’ve said this several times in various places on the net, but there is such a tale in my first family-in-law, which I heard from Keene Daingerfield, my first father-in-law. It’s about his daughter, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who died, alas, 25 years ago in January; she surely would have told it better than I’m about to). The story bears every mark of sheer invention on Keene’s part; the Daingerfields were given to embroidering on family stories to make them better in the telling, and were not above just making things up.
Ann’s “first words” (at roughly age 2) were reported to be:
I hear a train but I do not see it. Pa tells me it is far, far away.
Students of language acquisition, feel free to discuss.
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