Good Night or Good Knight?!

There is a secret handshake or something unique, each kid creates when they are young, and few sustain the time and others are lost. Those lost memories, when revived add a smile to the self and sometimes may earn the awkward reaction, from the listener.

My mother tongue is Tamizh, a language which doesn’t have the concept of ‘silent’ characters as much as English. And for a kid starting to spell the words, that is a bit complicated concept to grasp. One such complicated word for me was “Knight”. The word was introduced by the brand name “Good Knight”, the mosquito coil, before it was introduced to me by school.

So on that day of introduction, at night, I said, “Good Knight.”
But how do you differentiate between the night and knight, while saying it out aloud?
Hence, Good night was followed by “Gooduk night” (Yeah, that’s how the toddler me pronounced it!)

And from then on the following became my father’s and my Good night routine.

Good Night
Gooduk Night
GK
GN

And for years it was exchanged daily and with time it was forgotten, until my sister was in school. And by then, she knew how to pronounce “Knight” and lots more. Also, we have changed the brand of our mosquito repellent to “All Out”

So when we narrated this story, she asked why stop with one brand and created a new big series for exchange and she tells them in the same order every single time without any interchange. The List grew into…

Good Night
Gooduk Night
GK
GN
Good Knight
All Out
Mortein
Martin Cooper
Albert Einstein
Issac Newton
GOOD NIGHT

Wondering from where did all those people come? Or have you guessed it rightly that was the day, she learnt the name of those scientists and she started linking with the phonetics of Mortein-Martin…

And thus Newton and Einstein came into our everyday lives! Who would have guessed.. 😉