We are seeing how words can mislead, wound, charm and heal these days. A phrase that some use to seek justice make others feel threatened. Words can suggest a context that excludes. Historians have pointed out that the first characters that some children met in books caused the readers of Dick and Jane to feel excluded, because their lives were not like those of middle class suburbia Nearly all such books were boring. There wasn’t much to observe except to see Dick run. Jane and Sally apparently didn’t.
But one author changed everything. Instead of green lawns with no weeds we were catapulted into the world of an invasive cat who made a mess of the house when a mother left for the afternoon – and not even a fish in a bowl could save it. It didn’t take a ton of words to tell an interesting story for us and a different Sally – and rhymes made The Cat in the Hat memorable using only 222 different words. In a later triumph, the legendary Dr. Suess won a bet of fifty dollars when Bennett Cerf challenged him to write a book using only 50 words. He did even better by using only one word of more than one syllable – anywhere. Remember Green Eggs and Ham?
The Beginner Books were fun – both for parents to read and children to listen to at first -and then recite. It changed the children’s book publishing in terms of illusrations and it made reading fun. I notice that many Suess books can be downloaded and listened to on a tablet rather than being read by absent mothers and fathers. That’s rather too bad when those early readings created family bonds and bouts of laughter and maybe the Cat should point that out. The Suess texts later became much more sophisticated and handled topics like disarmament and the environment.
They still come back to me with a line or two from Too Many Daves whose mother lacked imagination in giving her twenty-three sons the same name – which meant they never came when she called them. Some more interesting alternative names were suggested . . .
“And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey.
And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.”
The last word here was always well received – but my all-time favourite was – and still is:
“Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.
Another one Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face.”
It was good to imagine calling people funny names - even insulting ones in a story, even though you weren’t supposed to do that in real life.. Maybe the other lesson was that Mothers didn’t always get it right,