In a Nutshell

Intoxicated Husbands Create Punky Night

The first Punky Night started as a search for wayward husbands. According to tradition, the men of Hinton St. George village in Somerset went to the fair held in nearby Chiselborough on the last Thursday in October. When their husbands did not return home, the wives went out to fetch them back. To light their way, the women carved lanterns out of a vegetable referred to as mangel wurzels or mangolds, similar to a turnip or a pumpkin. As the story goes, when the drunken husbands saw the lights, they were spooked thinking they were restless spirits and fled in terror.

Today, children carry the punkies, which are made from pumpkins. The word punkie comes from the word punk meaning tinder. The pumpkins are carved with designs or faces and lit with a candle. During the evening, the children parade through the village collecting money and singing punkie night songs like the one below:

It’s Punky Night, tonight

It’s Punky Night, tonight,

Give us a candle, give us a light.

It’s Punky Night, tonight.

It’s Punky Night, tonight,

It’s Punky Night, tonight

Adam and Eve, wouldn’t believe

It’s Punky Night, tonight.

Human Interaction Key to Language Development

A Wake Forest University study has found that toddlers learn their first words better from people than from television shows. While the TV might entertain children, they usually do not learn words from them, according to researchers.

Marina Krcmar, author of the study and associate professor of communication, evaluated the ability of children between the ages of 15 and 24 months to learn new words when the words were presented on a Teletubbies program. She also evaluated their ability to learn the new words from an adult in the same room with them. She found that children younger than 22 months did not accurately identify an object when taught a new word by a TV program, but were able to identify the object when taught by an adult standing in front of them.

"With the tremendous success of programs such as Teletubbies that target very young children, it has become important to understand what very young children are taking away from these programs," Krcmar said. "We would like to think it could work, that Teletubbies and other programs can teach initial language skills. That is not true.

"We have known for years that children ages three and older can learn from programs like Sesame Street," Krcmar said. However, she added, it’s becoming clear that children under the age of two do not benefit in terms of vocabulary building and language acquisition.