In the best examples of wordplay, among which I include both On Beyond Zebra! and Finnegans Wake, unusual attention to form not only does not take attention away from content but actually magnifies it. Seuss and James Joyce have more in common-also with biblical acrostics, contemporary blackout poetry, cryptic crosswords, and rap battles-than people generally suppose. Will I be pressured from now on to abandon these books, or at any rate the latter?Įveryone engages in wordplay, from infants to geezers, and Dr. This past semester we briefly considered One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, which I’m pleased to say has not yet been pulled from circulation, and On Beyond Zebra!. In 2015, Time magazine listed it among the “11 Bizarre College Courses We Actually Want to Take” four years earlier, it was ranked number 7 of 18 “Hottest College Courses” by the Daily Beast and number 2 of “22 Fascinating and Bizarre Classes Offered this Semester” by Mental Floss. Seuss and James Joyce are on the syllabus. In the fall, I taught, for the fifth time, a freshman seminar at Princeton University titled “Wordplay: A Wry Plod from Babel to Scrabble.” It is perhaps the only class in the country in which both Dr. It also equips them with the best antidote to life’s troubles: a sense of humor. I suggest that providing young children with models for how to bend language successfully-and how, yes, to illustrate these linguistic twists as well-increases the likelihood that they will grow up to be good writers and thinkers. As someone who teaches linguistics for a living, I care deeply about the role that language games play in liberal education, both in the classroom and at home. It is true that there is mention of a man Americans (still) celebrate with a federal holiday:Ī friend more attuned to the zeitgeist than I am suggests, however, that at issue are the orientalizing depictions of one Nazzim of Bazzim, who rides a camel-like beast called a Spazzim (spelled with the Seussian letter SPAZZ), and possibly also of Flunnel (spelled with FLUNN), a “softish nice fellow who hides in a tunnel.”įor me, this is not simply about cancel culture, though I shudder to imagine taking my children into secret tunnels to read to them some of the most creative and joyous writing of the twentieth century. When the morning news broke, I took On Beyond Zebra! back off its new shelf and tried to discern the problem. Seuss) would, unlike his predecessors Presidents Obama and Trump, fail to mention one of the country’s best-loved children’s authors. Seuss Enterprises would announce that six of his books, including On Beyond Zebra!, would no longer be published or licensed because “they portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” Or that President Biden in his proclamation for Read Across America Day (which takes place on March 2 specifically in honor of Dr. I did not imagine then that on the 117th birthday of Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra!, first published in 1955, in which Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell draws lettersĪnd I said, “ You can stop, if you want, with the Z Once he’d left, I put them up one by one-alphabetically, of course-stopping now and again to leaf through some I particularly like. Just last week, a wonderful cabinetmaker spent two days at my house installing shelves in a room where I have long intended to display my collection of alphabet books.
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