There Is A Certain Age At Which A Child Looks At You In All Earnestness And Delivers A Long, Pleased Speech In All The True Inflections Of Spoken English, But With Not One Recognizable Syllable.

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There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness
and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken
English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can
tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and
done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.
-- Annie Dillard, _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek_

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