I spent this weekend with my best friend and her family. Her three year old is one of the most vocal I've ever seen with complete sentences and utterly precious expressions. Conversations were fluent.
What amazed me most this weekend in these conversations was the consistency of this phrase: "What is the magic word?"
Of course, this three year old would always answer with "Please!"
The wordsmith inside of me kept thinking about this call and response and the use of the word "magic." Is part of our problem today that we, these generations of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers watchers, have set apart politeness from common, ordinary language? Why does politeness have to imply magic? Why does it get a special place, separate from that of the rest of the words that we use?
It made me think about what is perpetuated when certain kinds of language are moved into a different space, outside of normal and everyday.
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