Posted by Dr. Science on 01/18/2013 in
Question |
Why do babies drool?
———- from Cathie Petit of New York City, NY
Because they can. Drooling feels great, especially when you get a large stream of really slippery stuff going. It’s the liquid equivalent of speech, a form of communication that emphasizes fluidity and volume. The vocabulary is limited to saliva, but the syntax is complicated enough to produce poetry. Child psychologists used to think that drooling was a sublimated form of anger, but now they admit that most psychologists are overly squeamish and somewhat paranoid, and that poetry of any kind goes right by them.
