On-A-Manna Who?

We just watched the movie Short Circuit, one my husband and son have wanted to see. My daughter, at fourteen, is at an age where a campy 80’s robot movie is the perfect target for snarky comments. With every wisecrack we had to warn her not to spoil it for everyone else. But she did make one comment that struck me.

There’s a scene where the robot Number 5 is parachuting from a bridge and he yells, “Wheeeeee!”

Then right away my daughter snapped, “Robots do not use onomatopoeia.”

Something about that comment surprised me. Never mind the fact that even though the robot was using facial expression and following butterflies, the thing that bugged her the most was that he said wheeeee. What really impressed me was how effortlessly she recalled the word onomatopoeia.

I can appreciate reading and using examples of some cool literary devices, but the names don’t exactly roll off my tongue. I can’t remember them without first saying something like, “You know, whaddya call it…whaddya call it…that thing where the word sounds like the sound?”

Then of course I got distracted wondering whether the expression wheeeeee actually is an example of onomatopoeia. Is it meant to indicate the sound of wind rushing past our ears when we’re enjoying something like swinging, or parachuting off a bridge…wheeeeeeeee! (Of course, if we weren’t enjoying it we’d probably yell something more like aaaaaaaaaagghhh!) Or is it just an expression of emotion that only counts as onomatopoeia once we try to spell out the sound in writing?

So you can see the kind of thing that occupies my brain. At least I don’t spend time thinking up cute alliterative animal names like Wilhelmina Wombat or Sammy Slug. Oops, I just did.