Kids Who Love Obama

Young Obama Supporter in Des Moines, IA, originally created by Joe Crimmings Photography

The NYtimes did a great piece today on letters from children (ages 6 to 12) to president-elect (until Tuesday!!) Barack Obama.

Left: "Dear Barack Obama, you look too skinny", from NYtimes.com. Below, a letter from Holly.

Dear President/Mr. Obama,

The best thing about living in the White House would be running around like a maniac. The thing I would like least is the work.

— Holly Wong, age 9, San Francisco

So, so adorable and really, quite interesting. Kids are just so endearingly smart and simple-stated. I'm currently reading The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker, and the majority of the first chapter is centered around first language acquisition and how children inherently know how to speak English grammatically correct. And he points out many times, that when a child says something that seems to simply be a babble of words stuck together, there is actually massive intelligence behind what they are saying

i.e. - "I don't want it because I spilled it of orange juice."

Technically, the sentence is fine, based on all of the grammatical rules a child would have inferred from hearing other people speak. We just have come to accept a sentence (semantic construction like this) to sound off and that it is not acceptable to us.
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Hopefully, this isn't just me being a linguistics dork :)

Can't wait for Tuesday!!