Today’s One Big Happy:
Ruthie heard a name new to her, the name of a country, but she understood than it was pronounced the same as I plus a motion verb (thinking this way wouldn’t actually require that she had the term motion verb, but she can have the category concept without the name: unnamed taxons are all over the place). People use tricks of this sort to aid memory, especially memory for names, all the time — and they don’t always work quite the way their users had hoped, since they can lead down false trails.
So what she retrieves are words she knows: first IHOP (International House of Pancakes); then, recalling that it was a past tense form (again, this doesn’t require knowing the term past tense), she tries hopped, then skipped. And then her grandfather nails it: ran.
