One of the marvels of language development–this process that all of us parents get an unexpected front-row seat for–is how a child will occasionally fall into a vortex, some pattern of wrong or incomplete language that they get stuck in just long enough for us to take notice. It is a real phenomenon, not like the maybe-moral baby-gaze that is trumped and fluffed in this weekend’s NYT magazine.

One of these hiccups in language acquisition has turned my son–the auburn-haired heir of All that is Mine–into a kind of auto-repeating voicebox. On the eve of his second birthday, he made a cognitive leap to interrogative pronouns, but instead of the full arsenal of Who, What, Where, How and Why, he says Who to all of them. And in his previous act of new cognition, he got into relative pronouns, but stopped at That. So, in essence, the only thing he’s really wanted to say for the last two week is the same thing they’ve been saying in New Orleans for the last 30 years: Who Dat?

He wants to know where his sister is: Who dat?

He wants to know what is for dinner: Who dat?

He wants to know who is that kid on the playground: Who dat?

I think I smell another NYT Magazine cover story in here somewhere.