Conceptual Categories of the Young

I was lucky enough to be unemployed during the 6th Annual Rochester International Jazz Fest, so I spent a lot of time in Rochester for it, staying with my father. He lives off of Park Ave., which is a really great, almost European-style village full of unique restaurants and shops. Around dinnertime, you can stroll down the Avenue and be simply amazed by all the wonderful smells coming from the various eateries. One evening when I was eating outside with my girlfriend at K.C. Tea and Noodles on Park Ave., I overheard the following realization uttered by a young child of roughly between 4 and 6 whose parents were pulling him along in a wagon as they walked by:

"Every kitchen grabs my nose!"

I thought this was a pretty great example of the way children categorize different concepts. First, the use of "kitchen" instead of "restaurant" is a clear example of how children use basic-level terms much more frequently than non-basic terms. I'm willing to bet this child knew the word "restaurant", and maybe even had used it before. However, as the stimulation was primarily olfactory rather than visual, he simply called up the term that was most associated with {a place that you smell food in}. It was probably very convenient for the child to be able to have a such a strong lexeme like "kitchen" to select, since it's a familiar room in their own house, and probably where he (and his parents) spend a good deal of time.

What is probably the more interesting aspect of this utterance is the use of "grabs my nose." You could equate this phrase to something like "smells so good." The child here seems to be mapping the concept of sensing an odor, or "smelling," onto an action of physical contact with the sensory organ that interprets the odor. Another way of putting this would be to say that the child is making an animate character out of the odor, or anthropomorphizing it. It would therefore be feasible to think that if the child were in a similar situation, but perhaps the smells weren't necessarily good or there were a lot of different ones that he smelled very fast, he might say "Every kitchen taps my nose," or maybe even "Every kitchen touches my nose." On this analysis, strengthening the form of physical action indicates an increase in pleasure yielded by the odor at hand. On an alternate analysis, however, one might purport that the more intense the action semantically encoded by the verb, simply the stronger the smell. In other words, perhaps the verb doesn't encode the pleasure felt by the smell. On the first reading, we could also assume that if the odors were very strong and unpleasant, the utterance might have been "Every kitchen punches my nose!" or maybe "Every kitchen attacks my nose!"

A final note on the metonymy at play here: "kitchen" is standing in a metonymic relationship with "odors being produced by the kitchen." Nuff said.