Maybe Rhyming Words Can Sound the Same

One of my favorite poems is Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”. I know at least one first-grade teacher who dares not read it aloud to her students these days, but I used to read it aloud a lot to Doug and Adam — both the Little Golden Books version that’s on loan from Mom and Dad (who used to read it to my sister Ellen), and a newer version that Jan Brett illustrated. I like that you can sing it to the tune of “Beep-Beep” and have it match right down to the repetitions at the end of each verse; that when Doug was a toddler he’d say “you elegant fowl” as “you elephant fowl”; and that piggy-wig is an exception to Steven Pinker’s rule on rhyming nonsense pairs.

However, I cannot abide Edward Lear’s limericks.

Scooby-Doo Counterfactual

“And I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for these meddling kids!”

You can hear this line, or variants of it (”…and their dumb dog!”) during the denouement of many episodes of Scooby-Doo. Here’s one that you never hear:

Oh, yeah? Well, it was for us meddling kids, so you didn’t!”

There They Go Again –

– people saying that Amelia Bedelia always takes things literally! Didn’t we cover this already? Given an utterance with more than one meaning, Amelia Bedelia always chooses the interpretation of maximum funniness, one which disregards contextual or social clues, and which may or may not be a literal interpretation. Just because an interpretation is funny doesn’t mean it’s literal. And as my wife and sons can attest, just because it’s literal doesn’t mean it’s funny.

This business of literal meanings reminds me of something I heard on an episode of NPR’s Science Friday from September. I wasn’t going to say anything, I was just going to let it go, but since I’m on the subject…

Tolkien, Rowling, and Quotative Inversion

Yesterday I finished reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to Doug and Adam, and that’s enough Harry Potter for a while. I haven’t decided what we’ll take up next, but I did read them a little bit out of The Hobbit tonight to see how they liked it. We read only five and a half pages, but look what I found:

“We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. …I can’t think what anybody sees in them,” said our Mr. Baggins, and stuck one thumb behind his braces, and blew out another even bigger smoke-ring. (p. 7)

Harry Potter and the Grammar Police

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to Doug and Adam tonight. As I’ve read it for the past few nights, I’ve been paying special attention, seeing if it’s really true that, as Jan Freeman writes, “Even Harry Potter’s most loyal fans would concede that his creator, J.K. Rowling, has a weakness for adverbs.” I’ve heard this said before, but it’s never been something I really picked up on. Of course, it’s hard to know how seriously to take the criticism when, as Freeman demonstrates, some of the complainers don’t seem to know what an adverb is. In her column, Freeman quotes one ignorant reader who seems to think that adverb means “word that ends in -ly,” and who criticizes Rowling for having an adverb — deathly — right in the title of the final Harry Potter book.

You Don’t Have to Be Literal-Minded to Be Funny!

And yes, I know: Just because you’re literal-minded doesn’t mean you’re funny. Now that that’s out of the way…

When I was a kid, there were one or two occasions when a school librarian or a teacher or someone read the class a book about Amelia Bedelia. I thought they were OK, but not interesting enough for me to seek out any others to read. However, I read several more of them a few years ago, not just because I now have kids to read them to, but because these books are often specifically recommended as a good way for parents to teach kids about autism. The reason is that most of the humor in the books comes from Amelia Bedelia taking things literally. In almost every description or review of these books, this trait of Amelia Bedelia’s is brought up, and very often it’s true. I’m surprised I never noticed it in the one or two A.B. books that were read to me as a kid. All I remember thinking is, “Ha, ha, Amelia Bedelia sure is dumb!”

But one thing nags at me a little bit when I read these reviews or recommendations that talk about how literal-minded Amelia Bedelia is.

Dry Leaves That Before the Wild Hurricane Fly

Doug was showing me his reindeer-themed craft/snack from the Christmas holiday winter party at school last week. The kids had spread chocolate icing on an oblong cookie, and put on pretzels for antlers, and a single M&M (or as Glen puts it, an M) for a nose. What color M&M, you ask? Brown, the color of all Santa’s first-string reindeer’s noses? Or red, the nose-color of only one reindeer, who’s only called upon when the weather is foggy? Red, of course! Doug asked if he could have a brown one so he could do Prancer, and the parent who was helping suggested he chip off the candy shell. She was surprised when she came by later and found he’d actually done it.

Adam agreed that whenever teachers did a reindeer craft, the reindeer was always Rudolph. Then he tried to remember the other reindeer’s names. Doug and I recited the relevant couplet from “The Night Before Christmas,” and after the reindeer names we kept on going: “To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall! Now dash away, dash away, dash away all!” I kept on going:

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the housetop his coursers they flew,
With a sleigh full of toys, and Saint Nicholas, too.

Doug said, “What? What part is that?” That part wasn’t in the book he read at school.

Coordination and Quotative Inversion Meet Again

I’ve been reading another book by Beverly Cleary to Doug and Adam. This one is Muggie Maggie, which was published in 1990. As I read it, every now and then I notice a sentence that, although perfectly good standard English, strikes me as unusual style for Cleary. Finally, I decided I had to go through the whole book and find all these sentences. Luckily, the story is only 70 pages, so within ten minutes I had picked out:

1. “Many letters start up slowly, just like a roller coaster, and then drop down,” she said, and she traced over the first stroke of each letter with colored chalk. (14)
2. “Today we practice our signatures,” she said, and she looked at Maggie. (32)
3. “Well, it’s wrong,” she said, and she sighed so hard that Kisser looked anxious. (61)
4. I will not enjoy it, thought Maggie, and she said, “All those loops and squiggles. I don’t think I’ll do it.” (8-9)
5. “Oops,” said Mr. Schultz, and he closed his loops. (20)
6. “Good for you, Goldilocks,” said her father, and he rumpled her hair. (43)

Now, compare those sentences with these, from a post from back in June. These are from Cleary’s Henry and Ribsy, published in 1954:

1. “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and ran over to the driveway. (46)
   
2. “Wuf,” he said mildly, and waited patiently while Beezus frantically pried Ramona’s fingers loose from his tail. (64)
   
3. “Hi,” she answered, and entered the kitchen with her arms full of packages. (73)
   
4. “Ow,” he exclaimed, and pulled away. (7
   
5. “Wuf!” he said, and looked hungrily at the lunch box. (129)
   
6. Come on, salmon, bite, he thought, and tossed out his line.
   
7. “I won’t,” promised Henry, and got back into the car. (15-17)
   
8. “I have come to haunt you,” said Henry in his hollow voice, and let out a groan. (19)
   
9. “I just stepped into the market to buy a pint of milk to drink with my lunch,” began the officer, and went on to explain what had happened. (30)
   
10. “Wuf,” said Ribsy, and went to the refrigerator to show that what he really wanted was another piece of horse meat. (37)
    
11. “Day in and day out,” said Mrs. Huggins, and laughed. (39)
    
12. “Aw, keep quiet,” answered Henry, and grinned. (70)
    
13. “Oh, it’s nothing,” said Henry modestly, and bared his teeth. (90)
    
14. “Ribsy!” yelled Henry, and grabbed his dog by the collar. (94)
    
15. “Try and get it,” taunted Scooter, and began to laugh. (96)
    
16. “I wonder if…” began Mrs. Huggins and paused. (100)
    
17. “O.K., you old dog,” muttered Henry, and steeled himself for the meeting with Scooter and Robert. (103)
    
18. “Good old Ribsy,” said Henry, and hugged him. (111)
    
19. “Wuf,” answered Ribsy, and worried the rope. (112)
    
20. “Better not count on it,” said Mr. Grumbie, and yawned. (14
    
21. “Don’t lean out,” said Mr. Huggins sharply, and rewound the rope. (167)

See the difference? In H&R, whenever (1) Cleary uses and to indicate a sequence of two events; (2) the verbs for each event have the same subject; and (3) the first event is one of speech or thought, Cleary regularly omits the subject for the second verb. Thus for example, “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and ran over to the driveway, and not “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and he ran over to the driveway. In the whole book, you will not find a sentence like that. In MM, however, a book half the length of H&R, there are the six such sentences reported above. Moreover, there is not a single instance of Cleary omitting the subject for the second verb when the three conditions are met.

What happened between 1954 and 1990 to cause such a complete flip-flop? My guess is that a prescriptive grammarian got to her, and convinced her that the non-parallelism of “Ow,” he exclaimed, and pulled away was ungrammatical (unlike the non-parallelism of, say, John came early, and Marsha, late). All you linguists out there reading books by Beverly Cleary, check out how she handles sentences like these. With enough books for data points, we can answer important questions such as: When did the switch occur? Was it gradual? Has she alternated between styles over the years? Hey, we could make this the Beverly Cleary meme! On second thought, let’s not. If I launched a meme, then I’d feel guilty about ignoring memes I get tagged with.

Eating Shoots, and Leaving

Arnold Zwicky at Language Log recently wrote about the the kids’ version of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, but had to base his comments on examples quoted in a review on Amazon, since he hadn’t read the book. Well, now I have. My wife bought it to read to Doug and Adam, and they laughed at the funny pictures illustrating, for example, “Eat here and get gas.” However, I don’t think they’ll learn much about using commas from the book, other than that they can make a big difference in a sentence’s meaning.

Coordination Meets Quotative Inversion

Last summer, I added to my list of Friends in Low Places coordinations a couple that I got from a posting on Blogslot, written by Bill Walsh, a copyeditor for The Washington Post. Walsh read my post quoting him, and had this to say in a comment:

I have a similar problem with a common fiction device:

“I don’t love you anymore,” she said, and turned away from me.

She said it, but she didn’t turn-away-from-me it. I think another “she” is required after “and.”