Not Fawnee!

by B.J. on 4/05/2008 06:23:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

Comments: Post a Comment

I've been watching this "Buhlud" video and the Charlie Bit Me Video nonstop this weekend.

I'm just thinking, it wouldn't be bad to have a kid some day. But there was something I gleaned out out of all this watching.

The video speaks a bit to the human follies and challenges in the development of our abilities to communicate with one other.

Here's the video:



Stop at 55 seconds.

The second his father stops laughing, he thinks he's finally gotten his father's attention to an urgent situation. Just for confirmation that his father knows the situation, he blurts out a throwaway but final "buh-lud". However, it turns out that his father's actually holding it and this sends him into a very thunderous burst of laughter.

The Buhlud kid isn't sure for a split second of what to do. At about 55 seconds, for a split second, it actually looks like he's going to start laughing. He doesn't expect his dad to laugh anymore, he's supposed to understand!

After a split-second of indecision he finally decides the correct emotion to show: he's mad. And by god will he show it. He won't be taken seriously by dad? Fine. So he yells, prepares us with a mad face, and stomps down the definitive, conclusive "Not Funny!"

Its interesting that the kid can already sense that he's being not taken seriously. This speaks to an expectation he's developed that he would be taken seriously if he just kept yelling out a word he's associated with "urgency." I wonder when he began to form this set of expectations that make him believe his father's supposed to listen to him?

With his yelling of buhlud, he obviously expected that his father would pay attention to him and act urgently.

I also have to wonder when and where that association of "urgency" with "buhlud" came from and how often it was reinforced before he was able to finally use the word in a way that we all understood. I wonder the correlations are to memory.

I also wonder what this means for us as adults who can already understand the language and have already learned what to get mad at. We usually don't have these split-second about-to-laugh moments, or at least we hide them better than the child.
I wonder if the more automatic anger it becomes, the more related to your physiology it is.

Labels: ,

 



Home Page