Language is a pleasantly mutable form of communication that varies among nations, ethnicities, generations and even smaller groups. Our family is developing its own language thanks, in part, to Tiny’s creativity.

At age two his own personal lexicon began spilling over into ours beginning with incredibly flexible term “flop-bop.” It can mean a silly person or a thing whose name escapes the speaker or just about anything else. We also discovered with “flop-bop” that as we adopt a term, Tiny himself becomes less likely to use it.

Many words are variations on common ones like “lightlin” for the phenomenon that he is as fast as, “desploy” for the thing that videogame vehicles do when they run into walls, and (I’m not really sure how to spell this, and neither Medium nor I can really pronounce it correctly) “flahwnwers,” used to indicate the pretty, smelly bits at the ends of stems.

He is also exceedingly good at naming things, like our dog, Newhouse, that we got when we moved into our new house.

The newest thing is a bit of a mystery. Is the “entertaining stick” simply a device used to capture the dogs’ attention, or is it a training tool?

As seen in the photo below, the entertaining stick (actually one of two sticks by the same name) can be used to throw dog toys or to hold them out of reach for the purpose of making the dogs stand on their hind legs. On second thought, it’s obvious that it is an entertainment device — for him, the dogs, and his mom and me.