In the hands of an imaginative child, any physical object can become a car. We adults might have a few amused chuckles in our self-seduced superiority as we watch four-year-olds drive about crib cars, ladder cars, rake cars, hat cars, house cars (sitting on the front porch and the building's the chassis), ad infinitum. In fact, the harder challenge of turning one thing into a ridiculous version of another is a point of delight among very young children learning the language. Dave Berry did a very funny column recently about his daughter and the fun she and a playmate had calling each other 'tree head,' 'potato head,' 'Barbie head,' or whatever amusing name they could supply to represent the other's head.
There's a disturbing disconnection between what one group of humans might think is quite objective reckoning of which linguistic symbols accurately represent objective objects (and that's not even beginning to touch on abstractions) and what the other more imaginative group of humans might see as the potential of expanding and, happily, sometimes annihilating highly constrained objectivity. Picasso's credo: Rape nature.
The Great Depression: Couldn't afford gas for the car, so Papa hitched up the car to a mule and presto! Instant wagon! Better known as the Hoover cart. Now there's a car that became a wagon.
