ego.istic.org

Reading this Language Log post on various uses of “of” reminded me of a formative incident of my early youth.

In infant school, my teacher's method of teaching the class numbers was as follows. She would hold up a piece of card with the number line on it. This was an actual line printed on the card with marks at regular intervals. Under each mark was printed a number (in numerals, not words), zero being at the left-hand end, and the rest following in sequence. The first card just went up to 10, the next up to 20. On later cards most of the numbers were elided so they went up in 5's or 10's.

Anyway, she would hold up one of these cards, blot out one of the numbers with a finger, and ask an individual or the class together to name the number she had covered up. We're coming to the memorable thing now, which was the exact phrasing she used to ask this question: “What is my finger instead of?”

At the time, I was utterly unable to parse the question. It made no sense to me at all. I'm not sure now exactly what feature was so incomprehensible: the movement of “is” from its usual place in the phrase “is instead of”, the fact that the finger merely covered a numeral rather than being instead of anything, the fact that the question didn't specify the problem domain (i.e. apart from context, the answer could just have easily been “a prehensile tail” as “3”), or something else entirely.

Like so much of English when you are learning it new, even though I couldn't understand, it was obvious from context what the required answer was. It wasn't until years later that I remembered the question of old and realised what my teacher had been on about, long after I learned to count.