What BOOK are you reading right now?

I step off the plane, and for the first time in my life, I'm in Los Angeles. I'm not sure why I've never been here before. I certainly haven't had any preconceived notions about the place, other than the fact that the people here are insincere, draft-dodging, drug-taking, money grubbing, breast-implanting, out-of-touch, pate-eating, pompous, Lakers-loving, let's-do-lunching, elitist scumbags.

But here I am, open-minded as always.

"Alex had acquired [the spoken words] 'grape,' 'banana,' and 'cherry' on his own, because we named everything we fed him. 'Apple' was therefore going to be his fourth fruit label. Or so we thought. Alex apparently had other ideas.

By the end of the season for fresh apples, Alex had learned to produce a puny little 'puh' sound, a pathetic fragment of apple. We decided to try again the next spring, when fresh apples would arrive from the Southern Hemisphere. Months later Alex did condescend unenthusiastically to eat some apple when offered, but still only produced 'puh.'

Then suddenly, in the second week of training in Mid-March 1985, he looked at the apple quite intently, looked at me, and said 'Banerry . . . I want Banerry.' He snatched a bite of the apple and ate it happily. He looked as if he suddenly achieved something he had been searching for.

I had no idea what he was talking about. So I said, 'No, Alex, apple.'
'Banerry,' Alex replied, quickly but quite patiently.
'Apple,' I said again.
'Banerry,' Alex said again.

OK buddy, I thought. I'll make it a bit easier for you. 'Ap-ple.' I said, emphasizing the second syllable. Alex paused a second or two, looked at me more intently, and said 'Ban-erry,' exactly mimicking my cadence. We went through this double act several times: 'Ap-ple.' 'Ban-erry.' 'Ap-ple.' 'Ban-erry.' I was a little ticked off. I thought Alex was being deliberately obtuse. In retrospect, it was quite hysterical. When I told one of my students, Jennifer Newton, about it later, she literally fell off her chair laughing. But Alex hadn't quite finished with me just yet. At the end of the session he said, very slowly and deliberately, 'Ban-err-eee,' just as I might do with him when I was teaching him a new label. Maybe he was thinking, Listen carefully, lady. I'm trying to make this easy for you. I wrote in my journal that Alex seemed 'almost angry with us.'

I still had no idea what Alex was talking about, even though he obviously thought he did. Try as we might, he wouldn't budge from 'banerry.' No matter how hard we worked to get him to say 'apple,' he stuck with his label. As far as Alex was concerned, 'banerry' it was and 'banerry' it was going to stay.

A few days later I was talking to a linguist friend about all this. He said, 'It sounds like lexical elision.' It's a fancy term for putting parts of two different words together to form a new word. Alex might have thought the apple tasted a bit like a banana. Certainly it looked like a very large cherry (it was a red apple). 'Banana' + 'cherry' = 'Banerry.'

Nope but it looks creepy....was it is good?