I just sat down for some cereal at the purple house dining room table and I suddenly hear a faint whisper of “J” and the “ce” (to the ear it sounds like “ss”) parts of my name and I perked straight up in my chair and looked over at the source… Sonika, who was in the midst of packing for her family reunion trip. So just to be sure, I said “huh?”. And she replied with another faint whisper, which had my undivided attention this time, of “good morning, Joceryn” (yes the “r” is intentional, she started it Sophomore year…).
And the next thing you know, I’m wondering if we learn names the same as dogs.
Dogs can’t hear the shapes and densities of the sound that make up the words that make up the language spoken between people (this is not a fact, this is an assumption I just made). So when people hear “sit”, dogs probably hear maybe a muffled version of that..? I don’t know. I’m just guessing based on that universal guideline that discourages people from naming their dogs with names that rhyme with “sit” and/or one-syllable names because a lot of commands are one-syllable.
If I’m out and about, someone can say “Justin” across the room and I will perk up and look for who may have just addressed me. ”Jostled” and “Josh” and if someone is emphasizing the “jah” sound when they say: “jogging”, “Jonathan”, “job search” (this one gets me easily because of the “jah” and the “ss” sounds), and …I don’t know what else. Those are the main ones. So again, I can only assume that we recognize our names by its particular sounds. Or moreso…only certain sounds of our names are necessary for us to recognize it as our names (whether or not someone just called out “Jocelyn” or “Job Search”), you with me still?
So that was about RECOGNIZING or names, I realize. Okay about LEARNING our names. How long did it take for my dog back home at my dad’s house in Seattle to learn that his name was Bosley? Especially because when we brought him home as a puppy, I was always calling him “Bobo”. He learned by conditioning..? Maybe at first, every time we said anything, any sound of a human voice, he would respond to and come over…and realize that we weren’t actually directing our attention to him because we were talking to ourselves about what to get at the grocery store. Maybe it took a while for him to associate the sounds “Bosley” or “Bobo” with people giving him their undivided attention. And maybe that’s how they learn that that is their word, that is their name. And maybe that’s how we learn it too. I don’t remember far back enough into my childhood.
Also I forget why this idea was interesting to me fifteen minutes ago, I’ve been done with my bowl of cereal for ten minutes now, and I want to go run some errands and then maybe get back to an alternating cycle of reading and napping throughout most of the rest of the day.
