Pinkwater – Little Pitchers Have Big Ears

A lot of kids that age seem to have no problem with polysyllabic words in Latin – words like “Tyrannosaurus” and “Stegosaurus” for example…

Greek (sorry).

Absolutely agree that children should have books with unfamiliar words in – the main alternative seems to be teaching vocab by creepy weirdo methods like spelling-bee coaching. Occasionally, when reading to them, you can explain what words mean of course, if you really have to. But for the most part, there’s enough context to home in on meaning, esp. after a few repeat encounters – occasionally you get an idiosyncratic impression about a word, but in a way not running to the dictionary the whole time – I’ve never done that, it’s not too far off to say I consider it cheating – can give you a headstart on the lexicographers when it comes to actual current usage. Kind of, maybe.

Latinate and to some extent Greekate terms perhaps especially good to get an early handle on because they tend to have reusable constituents like sub, even fuge. Which also makes them easier to parse once you have made a start

My two girls were relentless readers from the age of 4. The younger one, especially, consumed just about anything she could get her hands on. When she ran out of vocabulary, she found an ancient, incomplete copy of Hook on Phonics in the basement, broke it out, and worked her way through it, without prompting, with an attention and determination astonishing to behold.

Since turning 11, she’s ripped through all seven Harry Potters, Jim Hines’s Three Princesses trilogy, and is now deep into Redwall.

You do your children no favors by withholding worthy knowledge from them.

As much as I love my e-reader, I fear the era of the e-book. Books as furniture, bookshelves as signals for what a family values, are doomed in an era when, as one wag put it, “the paper book is going the way of the horseshoe.” I wonder how my children’s children will see, “Mom loves books.” All she’ll be able to do is stare at a screen, just like them.

Shoot – SamChevre beat me. I *immediately* flashed on Just So Stories, but apparently SC gets up and on his computer earlier than I. But definitely Kipling FTW.

There was a flashback to my own childhood in this — a very rare thing these days — and to the two great aunts, both teachers, who gave me the first in the series of Dr. Doolittle books for my birthday when I was seven, and another in the series every birthday thereafter until I was twelve or so, when one of them died.

By that time I was reading just about everything, including things no one in my school administration thought I should be reading, but I still loved unwrapping those Doolittle books every October. As for the tsk-tskers at school, my parents, who seemed oblivious to most of what I was up to in those days, were pretty rigorous about defending me from the well-meaning. For them my reading habits were just another of those things that they didn’t have a hand in, but held harmless anyway. To this day, I’m convinced that tolerance isn’t such a bad way to approach parenting. It certainly beats the earnestness of some middle-class parents I’ve known, who seem to take such a prurient interest in rearing their own children.

Anyway, the point about the mysteries of vocabulary is a telling one. It wasn’t until I’d been an adult for a long time that I discovered that being able to use a polysyllabic word correctly in every conceivable context isn’t the same thing as knowing what it means. This is the dark heart of education, surely, if not of culture itself. It also explains a lot about William F. Buckley’s obsessions, for example. I thought — and still think — that those obsessions midwifed a lot of evil in their day, but I still have at least some sympathy for the boy who kept his nose in the Oxford Unabridged so long that it drove him mad.

I was a huge Dr Doolittle fan in my day, but I’m not sure that the plotline about the Crown Prince of the Jolliginkies and his quest for the perfect skin-whitener has stood the test of time.

The obvious choice here is A Series of Unfortunate Events: one of Lemony Snicket’s stylistic tics is to bring in a Big Word, explain it and make a joke out of the explanation, using a phrase like “which here means”. The first book in particular is a very easy read, as books about children being orphaned and then kidnapped go. In real life the author is a friend of Stephin Merritt, which gives you some idea of what to expect in terms of dedication to maintaining a high style.

To me, the bigger problem has always been adults reading YA. I cannot imagine that there is actually a mafia around that tells you how many big words you can use in your children’s book. Kids will like it or kids will not, and there isn’t really some objective reason why, yaknow?

If you’re a bit of a ham, it can be great fun to read Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats aloud.

The Snicket books are great fun. He’s always playing with language in entertaining ways. The thing about his definitions of big words is that they are almost satires of the act of defining: they are highly idiosyncratic and specific to the situation, so the kid doesn’t necessarily learn the word (which is not always an obscure one anyway) well, but gets a sense of how plastic and context-driven the meaning of words is. He also does things like have a page explaining deja vu, which is duplicated on the next page.

For my fifth birthday an eccentric uncle gave me a comparatively enormous tome called “The Golden Treasury of Natural History”, which I proceeded to devour like a novel with the result that I could do ‘monocotyledon’ as well as ‘diplodocus’. My long suffering parents expanded their vocabularies almost as fast as I did. The possible downside was that I was marked as a gazetted nerd from there on.

I share Elf’s concern about the implications of the death of the codex. Books do furnish a room. But I expect children will be able to find suitable challenges on the web. They usually manage.

…I’ll just (highly tangentially) note that it’s the tipmost height of parental irresponsibility to let one’s young kid devour book after book with polysyllabic vocabulary without checking in to discover what words have been introduced in those books, with the intent to drop, carefully enunciated, those words into conversations with, or overheard by, said kid.^1^ Dictionaries do well enough connecting the meaning to the word for kids, but I’d bet few to none of them work through the IPA. It must have been years before I finally realized I’d been catastrophically mispronouncing the written word ‘facetious’ (along the lines of fastidious without the d) and catastrophically misspelling and misusing the spoken word (phasecious, picking up the tail end of delicious, maybe? can’t even remember how I’d been misspelling it). Similar experiences^2^ with, off the top of my head, ‘aegis’ (ah-ee-jis, somewhat in the cadence of an ahooga car-horn), ‘vague’ (which I used to rhyme with segue instead of beg), ‘gauge’ (took my cue from auger, instead of rhyming with rage), ‘rendezvous’ (obvious), ‘triage’ (if this takes three ages to complete, or even just three syllables’ time, quite a lot of patients are screwed), ‘heinous’ (surely about half of my fellow second-graders would have loved to know what this actually rhymed with), and ‘niche,’ which is not the name of a philosopher. Quite a lot of literate adults found the things little-I said quite amusingly adorable; it took years (and a fair amount of unnecessary, irrelevant, anxious introspection) to sort out why…

^1^nowadays the Merriam-Webster online has a built-in Quicktime pronunciation audio-sample , so maybe this comment is obsolete as well as facetious!

^2^my partner remembers discovering the inscrutable ‘mascarpone’ at an early age, misannunciated either mass-*car*-puhn-ee in the cadence of ‘the trilogy’ or mass-car-pown, in the cadence of Nascar-owned

My parents told me, when I was about 3, that many of the stories they read to me involved “anthropomorphism”. I passed this information along to my son at a similar age. I passed along also was exposed to Gilbert and Sullivan at a pretty early age, and thought that the “patter” songs (which not only use huge Brit -English vocabularies, but use them at machine-gun tempi) were pretty funny, long before I was even able to dope out the actual words, let alone the meaning. Again, passed it along to our son). …and then there was Pinkwater (of whose works my son was an avid consumer, starting with “Splot”, and “Wuggie Norple”) and Kipling…

Another shout out for Kipling; I read the Just-So Stories to my 10-year-old daughter a while back, and they haven’t spoiled at all. The trick when you see one of those passages coming up is to brace yourself and take it in a conversational tone, at just slightly faster than normal speed. There’s stuff in there that I don’t understand myself – I’m not even sure that he did – but the words, O the words.

Hi, Substance!

My younger self once referred to ‘the bits of food eaten at the beginning of Thanksgiving dinner’ as ‘horse doo-vers’.

I can laugh about it, now.

Oops. As lack of commas shows Kindle posting is not yet free of problems.

I need to get this off my chest.

The problem my 3 boys & I are finding at the moment (they are 8,9 & 11) is that virtually all the books in the store intended for boys their age have a vocabulary that starts and ends with bodily functions and orifices. (“Why is it always about bums & farting Dad?”). Things have quietened down at present because they have discovdered their Mum’s Agatha Christie collection…

Tony Lynch – if you’re looking for a recommendation, see
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/21/michael-chabon-phantom-tollbooth-wonder-words/

A lot of kids that age seem to have no problem with polysyllabic words in Latin – words like “Tyrannosaurus” and “Stegosaurus” for example…

Très drôle, but they are proper nouns nonetheless.

But for the most part, there’s enough context to home in on meaning, esp. after a few repeat encounters – occasionally you get an idiosyncratic impression about a word, but in a way not running to the dictionary the whole time – I’ve never done that, it’s not too far off to say I consider it cheating – can give you a headstart on the lexicographers when it comes to actual current usage. Kind of, maybe.

I’m not too enthusiastic about the whole early-reading arms race, to be honest. It’s not like any country in the West has a literacy rate anywhere even noticeably distinguishable from 100%.

Re #38: where do the stats come from?

@Myles, those below-100 rates are nearly entirely age effects. Quite some people who didn’t go to school 60+ years ago are for still alive. Especially women, who were less liekly to go to school in the first place. Doesn’t mean that the literacy rate among younger generations is far below 100.

On the other hand, literacy is not a very sharply defined thing. In all countries with supposedly literacy rates over 99%, there are still many people whose reading skills are very basic, to the level that reading a book would be heavy effort.

It’s practically a taboo, and programs to teach reading skills to adults have to be extremely tactful to get people to admit they need it. Admitting you need to learn better reading is a sure way to lose jobs, and to have people in general assume you must be very stupid. So people really hide it.

Wikipedia has, last time I looked, citations for its claimed figures. (Do they not teach people to cite sources for figures thrown into discussions?)

Wind in the Willows…my mother found an amazing audio version in the library when I was 3 or 4, and then I got my very own records when I was 5. Yes, records, LPs. More recently, I have used it in class, and the vocal is rich and multi-syllabic.

More recently, the Mr Gum books by Andy Stanton are very funny, along the linesof Lemony Snicket but less pleased with themselves and a more British sense of humour…don’t get me wrong, we love Lemony and especially the audio versions read by Tim Cury, whose rendition of Esme Squalor is particularly fine. But Mr Gum is also very engaging and surprisingly witty. Tho that may be relief that we have moved on from capt underpants and the wimpy kid series.

China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun is for older kids, but its vocabulary is impressive. And it’s very fun.

I don’t think you need to be too worried that e-readers will destroy kids’ love of reading. I showed my seven-year-old nephew how to download e-texts from Project Gutenberg onto an iPod, and next time I looked he was several chapters into Black Beauty.

For those into snotty one-upmanship, late is better than never: the roots in “Tyrannosaurus” and “Stegosaurus” are Greek not Latin.

Even in countries where surveys shows literacy rates near 100%, books in the home have been shown to be correlated with the level of education achieved by children.

So to take up Elf’s point, how will this work when there are no books on the shelves? Will parents load all their ebooks onto the kids tablets? Will they be able to share books they buy?

My son is 10, and can find and read the copies of the Barsoom books that I’ve had since I was 10. How likely is that in an ebook world?

My mother would quote Emily Dickinson from memory and smile, as if it was an inside joke she wanted to share with me (at four or five). I couldn’t wait to figure the words out. As an adult, teaching African-American kids to love Shakespeare and all kinds of poetry, I use the same technique; lots of love and and a hint of magic go miles to convince young people that words are great fun.

Scientific names are in Latin.

Interesting point. Is, for example, Mei long Latin? What declension do we assign these words to (3rd, I suppose)? I think the fiction of Latin Linnaean names is wearing pretty thin these days. I’ll grant you the specific name in Tiktaalik roseae, but the genus?

Yes, but the words themselves are Latin, not Greek. Scientific names are in Latin.

This turns out to be true. Live and learn. Which means that Latin is not in fact a dead language inasmuch as new words from all kinds of languages are being adopted into it all the time. (Including my surname, as several species of South American mammals are called handleyi after the son of my grandfather’s first cousin. Something I learned only recently, thanks to the Internet.)

And they don’t all, of course: Velociraptor is pure Latin.

Because it’s a Friday, I am allowed to chuckle out loud over Wikipedia’s account of the attempt to rename Megalosaurus based on the first Latin description of the first fossil found,back in the 17th century.

Why not? Most kids I know learn to access files on machines years before they learn to read. Video files on computers, games on the DS, TV recordings. And touch screens are moving that barrier lower, since they require less motoric skills to operate. 2 year olds have little trouble skimming through picture books on a tablet.

Yes. The nook already allows sharing (I don’t know about other e-readers), and it’s easy to imagine that concept expanding into a family plan, so that everyone in a household can potentially access the same library. It won’t matter that houses aren’t strewn with books, because kids won’t look up from their screens long enough to notice. Physical books may come to seem as quaint as a phone (one per house, at most) that screws into the wall, with a hand crank and a party line.

Not that I’m not sad about it; I love seeing books strewn all over the house.

“I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me.”
-Winnie the Pooh