Wippen

Sometimes I love the efficiency of German. Often I look at a German sentance and see a train wreck, but there are some brilliant individual German words. I once read that the English language has more than twice as many words as German (don't ask me where, if I even still have that book it's in a moving box), but now and then I come across a German word for which there is no English equivalent. Wippen is one of those words.

When a child is learning to crawl, there is a progression that nearly all children all around the world follow. At first a baby laying on his stomach can't lift his head. Then suddenly, she can. Slowly she develops the strength to lift more and more of her torso off the floor, resting on her forearms and for all the world resembling a lizard on a hot rock. Then he starts to airplain - arms and legs off the floor, rocking on his stomach. Then comes the grub phase - babies inchworming their way across the floor, sometimes resembling a tiny Marine dragging his body through the mub on his elbows. Then, suddenly, at long last, his chest and pelvis are both off the floor at the same time and there he is on his hands and knees. At first she doesn't make any forward progress - most babies spend several days in this stage, balancing on their hands and knees and rocking back and forth. Wippen. That's right. There is one verb in German that means "stand on your hands and knees and rock back and forth without making any forward progress," and it's wippen.

And it's Small Boy's latest trick.