Lexicon on the Lam! The Great Dictionary Caper by Judy Sierra

THIS STORY IS BROUGHT TO YOU

BY NOAH WEBSTER AND HIS DICTIONARY

Talk about being IN ORDER! What is more orderly than a dictionary?

It's absolutely, awesomely alphabetical.

But although the dictionary arranges words alphabetically, words themselves are not, strictly speaking, orderly at all. They are definitely disorderly.

Remaining in place, words get restless. And restive. And rebellious.

They sit in the dictionary. Day in. Day out. It's time for a break.

Words march to a different drummer. And the onomatopoeia words can be cacophonous.

BEEP! BANG!

Action words can't stay put.

RICOCHET! SOMERSAULT!

Anagrams keep switching their letters' places.

And watch out for palindromes. They don't know which way they want to GO!

Rhyming words are persnickety employees; they only work when they can hang out with each other.

And those synonyms are major snobs! They often hang out together in their own exclusive place--an exclusive secret society called The Thesaurus.

And those interjections! They tend to be RUDE!

Author Judy Sierra is fond of rhyming text and a wizardess of wordplay, especially in her salute to these and other properties of the language in her The Great Dictionary Caper (Simon and Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books), in which the lexicon rebels in linguistic fashion. Sierra lets the lingo loose,but conscientiously corrals its characters in an appended glossary, itself a form of dictionary. Artist Eric Comstock's little pen-and-ink illustrations lets the letters run free, and kids will find plenty of winsome wordplay contained within these covers.

"Teachers will have field day with this wordplay; this caper is clever, capricious, and cunning," says Kirkus Reviews" starred review.

Wee Wordsmiths Wanted! Bigger Words for Little Geniuses by Susan and James Patterson

An ailurophile is likely to have a chasmophilous pet!

Ailurophile - an adorer of cats.

Chasmophilous - creatures who love to squeeze into nooks and crannies

If you have a cat or kitten who loves to squeeze himself into boxes or shoes, you are an ailurophile with a chasmophilous pet.

Whether the words in this new picture book for young logophiles are long and latinate, or wacky and wild, they are deliciously juicy and artfully arcane: not your usual A Is For Apple alphabet book for tots but a solid lexicon for bigger kids who like to wrap their tongue around weighty words.

In their Bigger Words for Little Geniuses (Little, Brown and Company, 2019), Susan and James Patterson offer a scintillating sequel in their series. The Pattersons offer a potpourri of  splurge words, with well-known literary favorites like "jabberwocky," a word created by Lewis Carroll in his Alice in Wonderland to mean "gibberish," sweet words to savor that also sound like what they mean, like melliferous, which draws its root from the Latin word for honey, wacky words like widdernshins, which inexplicably means "counterclockwise," or limited-usage words like Yoicks, a word used to urge hunting dogs to give chase.

Childhood is the crucial time for language learning, and although most kids may not find ways to work some of these words into their normal lingo, there is much value in learning that there are many ways to say almost anything, a special power in acquiring a taste for that indispensable sine qua non--words--the tools of communication. As you might guess, the authors even provide an appendix of even more words. After all, the English language has a million of them!

Pair this one with the Patterson's initial offering, Big Words for Little Geniuses (see review here).

Awful Abecedarius! P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by Raj Haldur and Chris Carpenter.

A IS FOR AISLE.

The bread aisle has not been cleaned in aeons!

Alas! Spelling in the English language has always been a wonder, as in... we constantly wonder why it's so weird! (And by the way, why is weird not spelled like beard?)

How do we no, er, "know" why we spell "photograph" the way we do, instead of "fotograf?"

And why is frog spelled with an "f" if a frog is an amphibian?

There is a reason. Although English is named after the Anglo-Saxon language, England suffered a chain of invasions in the post-Roman period, and, as English spread, it survived by soaking up words from those other languages like a sponge. Thanks to that, English probably has more ways to say things than most other languages (We can eat chicken or poultry, cow or beef), which gives us native speakers a lot of downright goophy, er, goofy ways of spelling odd words until you know where they came from. For example, Greek is responsible for pterodactyl, which meant "finger-winged" with a silent "p."

Raj Haldar's and Chris Carpenter's witty and best-selling P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever (Sourcebooks/Jabberwocky, 2018) has a lot of fun with the oddities of English, especially those weird words beginning with silent letters, such as knight and knee and knot. What about gnat, gnocchi, and gnome, and tsunami, Tchaikovsky, and tchotchkes, or wren, write, and wrapper? Why is ewe not spelled like you? And why don't quinoa and quiche start with "k"?

Haldar's and Carpenter's tongue- (what's with the ue?) in-cheek exploration of unusual spellings makes for tons of fun (not tuns of fon), ably abetted by the witty illustrations of their creative comic colleague (there's that pesky ue again) Maria Tina Beddia, which make this one altogether The Worst Alphabet Book Ever. Great for elementary English logophiles who might as well learn to have some fun with our quirky (not kwirky) but beloved language. Have you heard it's a word nerd's delight and a spelling bee contestant's worst nightmare? (Or is that knightmare?)

A book that might benight or delight (or indict and leave contrite) even an errant but erudite knight!

A Quark of Rhetorical Questions? An Ambush of Tigers: A Wild Gathering of Collective Nouns by Betsy R. Rosenthal

Does an ambush of tigers
quietly creep
past a bed of oysters
that snores in its sleep?

Word lovers delight in coming up with clever names for groups of living things, and many of them are already familiar....

A bevy of beauties? A gaggle of geese? A pride of lions? Sure.

But what about all those lesser-known group names?

In Betsy R. Rosenthal's catalog of collective terms, An Ambush of Tigers: A Wild Gathering of Collective Nouns (Millbrook Picture Books) (Lerner/Millbrook Press, 2015), there are all kinds of names of like things. Some are familiar, like a bed of oysters or a team of oxen. Some are more arcane, such as a a parcel of penguins. Some are quite clever and fittingly comic--an intrusion of icky cockroaches, a stench of stinky skunks, and a lounge of lizards lazing in the sun. Some are simply mystifying: why is a bunch of mallards a flush? Why not a flight or a flotilla? An ambush of tigers fits the hunting style of those big cats, a stand of flamingos fits their famous one-footed stance, and a prickle of porcupines is perfect for those quill-covered critters. But who came up with a bouquet of pheasants? Isn't that supposed to be a brace... or are they a brace only when freshly dispatched by a sport shooter? And a business of flies? Go figure!

Author Betsy R. Rosenthal, ably assisted by artist Jago, has a lot of fun with all of them in her quaint and quirky quatrains with jolly meter and unpredictable but eminently pleasing rhymes, all framed as humorous rhetorical questions.

Does a pack of wolves
load up bags for vacation?
Does a cast of hawks
get a standing ovation?

When a murder of crows
leaves barely a trace,
is a sleuth of bears
hot on the case?

Jago's illustrations--a sleuth of bears with Sherlock-like magnifying glasses and a troop of kangaroos selling Girl Scout cookies--are as whimsical as Rosenthal's verses, shown in atmospheric double-page spreads which entertain and engage young readers. Rosenthal follows up with a scholarly glossary of definitions of the collective terms used in the book.

"This crash course in juxtaposition and imagination should be celebrated with a peal of bells. An inspiring addition to any poetry collection", says School Library Journal in its starred review, and the other reviewers also awarded this one a veritable firmament of stars.

Heavy, Man! On the Scale, a Weighty Tale by Brian P. Cleary

Weighing things is how we find
the heaviness of stuff--
a soccer ball,
great-grandma's shawl,
a bag of pillow fluff.

Making sense of mathematical concepts is no laughing matter in the elementary grades, but a bit of jolly rhyme and some zany, rainbow-colored cats on your side couldn't hurt. To that end, Brian P. Cleary and Brian Gable are back with their latest entry in their very popular concept series, Math Is Categorical/Words Are Categorical (Millbrook Press).

On the Scale, a Weighty Tale (Math Is Categorical) takes on weighty matters in its explanation of the traditional "English" measurement system (now properly termed the "American/Canadian" system since the U.K. has virtually dropped it) and its rival, the metric system. Cleary carefully associates the terms for weight with common objects to give the reader the "feel" as well as the terminology for each unit:

An ounce is just the thing to use
for very light amounts.
That slice of bread
you've just been fed?
It weighs about an ounce.

Gable's frolicking cats and apprentice mice illustrate each concept humorously, as when in the verse above we see a perturbed feline storekeeper in the process of selling a full loaf as a larcenous gray mouse makes off with a stack of sixteen slices. The text then proceeds to illustrate the concept of the 16-ounce pound and the 2,000-pound ton:

A ton is huge--
it takes 2,000 pounds
to make just 1.
Cars, and whales upon the scales
are measured by the ton.

Cleary and Gable next scale their story to the metric system, beginning with its smallest common unit, comparing each metric unit to its American cousin to create a frame of reference for the reader:

A gram is not a cracker
and it's not your parents' mothers.
It's a weight,
so get this straight--
it's smaller than most others.

A dollar bill or paper clip
weigh near 1 gram, you know.
Inside 1 ounce, you can announce,
there's 28 or so.

The author continues with the kilogram and the metric ton:

1,000 kilograms are what
make up 1 metric ton--
about as heavy as a Chevy
(at least the smaller one.)

Cleary and Gable's humorous but light-hearted look at hefty matters of measure makes a great introduction to a subject so often weighed down by hard-to-remember tables of measure to be memorized. Bouncy verse and comic illustrations help the basics of weight stick without weighing upon the mind, until at last the reader is graduated, magnitude cum laude:

You've picked up lots of "heavy" words
and now you know enough
to teach a class, because--alas--
you've learned a TON of stuff.

At a bargain price, this title and others in these two notable co-series do an admirable job in explaining grammatical terms and mathematical operations to the elementary reader. Take a look, for example, at their tantalizingly titled How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear?: What Are Homonyms and Homophones? (Words Are Categorical), Hairy, Scary, Ordinary: What Is an Adjective? (Words Are Categorical), Pitch and Throw, Grasp and Know: What Is a Synonym? (Words Are Categorical), and, that wordsmith's favorite, Rhyme & Punishment: Adventures in Wordplay. And for the numerically numb, see, for example, The Action of Subtraction (Math Is Categorical) and The Mission of Addition (Math Is Categorical).

Great for teachers, homeschoolers, and just plain interested parents, and fun enough for kids to pick them up on their own, this title and its series mates make a good jumping off place for some heavy-duty concepts.

It's Idiomatic: Raining Cats and Dogs by Will Moses

HORSING AROUND

Means: Just playing around.

Everyone thought Great-Aunt Zelda was just horsing around when she entered the Derby, but she won!

Few verbal expressions are harder to explain to small children than the common idioms we use to color our speech and convey complex meanings economically. Some, such as "mad as a wet hen," have fairly obvious meanings. The meanings (and origin) of others, such as "can of worms," are almost lost in antiquity. (To open up a "can of worms" may derive from the special bait containers once used to carry live worms, who, if allowed to escape, would be impossible to catch and return to their can.) ,

Will Moses' Raining Cats and Dogs: A Collection of Irresistible Idioms and Illustrations to Tickle the Funny Bones of Young People is a pictorial guide to the true meanings of 48 such English expressions, from "bad egg" to "writing on the wall." Moses not only defines the idiom succinctly, but offers humorous illustrative sentences to show how the expression might be used. For example, to define a "short fuse," Moses says that it means that "someone easily loses his temper--zip!"

But the final bit of meaning comes from Moses' quaint and humorous full- or half-page illustrations, which accompany each idiom. For example...

HIGH AND DRY

Means: Being left without a means to survive.

.
...is illustrated by a Moby Dick of a whale on the sea's surface, with a ship's dory high and dry on his back and in which two sailors and their captain are marooned, with this caption....

No food, no map, and now no water! Methinks we've been left high and dry, the captain said.

If there is something vaguely familiar about these primitive Americana-styled illustrations, there is good reason. Will Moses is the great-grandson of Grandma Moses, himself a successful artist in the family style, and his wry, picturesque graphic humor adds much to the fun--and teachability--of the book. His Great-Aunt Zelda, a portly but playfully enthusiastic Derby jockey in her matronly lace-trimmed dress, and his "bad egg" chick just hatched and already in jailbird stripes, offer clever wordplay embedded in visual humor which absolutely nails the exact feeling of the idiom.

Raining Cats and Dogs: A Collection of Irresistible Idioms and Illustrations to Tickle the Funny Bones of Young People is a great read-aloud for English classes or just for browsers who enjoy the double-entendres of the idiomatic expression. Other similar books include grammarian Marvin Treban's Scholastic Dictionary Of Idioms (Revised) (for the serious idiom lover), In a Pickle: And Other Funny Idioms, Mad as a Wet Hen!: And Other Funny Idioms, Punching the Clock: Funny Action Idioms, and Catherine Snodgrass' Super Silly Sayings That Are over Your Head: A Children's Illustrated Book of Idioms. We English speakers have a vast language which can also be a lot of fun to "horse around" with, and we might as well "take the bull by the horns" and enjoy it!

Mark My Words: Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why Every Punctuation Mark Counts by Lynne Truss

WILLIAM BROUGHT AN EXTRA LARGE PIZZA.

WILLIAM BROUGHT AN EXTRA-LARGE PIZZA.

Question: Which William brought more pizzas to the party?

Answer: The first William brought at least two large pizzas.

William II brought only one pizza, but at least it was an extra-large size.

Lynne Truss, professor of imperiled punctuation, has published her third book trumpeting her mantra "Every punctuation mark counts!" Author of the best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, and its sequel (reviewed here August 12) The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage without Apostrophes!, Truss' new book, Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, every punctuation mark counts!, takes a critical but comic look at the oft-misunderstood hyphen, quotation marks, parentheses, and even the question mark, exclamation point, and period.

As in her earlier picture-book formatted books, Truss and illustrator Bonnie Timmons utilize the one-frame cartoon layout to combine Truss' clever one liners with the artist's humorous comic interpretations. For example, her left-hand page features a cartoon showing parents dragging a shy and reluctant child to the door of an apartment where a birthday party, complete with helium balloons for each kid, is in apparent full swing. The caption reads

"Where do you think we're taking you? To the dungeons?"

The facing cartoon shows a kid being led by a couple of medieval executioners down into a dark underground prison, with the caption

"Where do you think? We're taking you to the dungeon."

The powers of the quirky quotation mark are displayed in another double-page spread. The first cartoon panel shows a a couple of sleepy kids and a bathrobe-clad mom pointing out a towering pyramid of gifts in front of the Christmas tree, with a caption that says

"Do you know who came last night? Santa Claus!" said my mom.

The opposite panel shows Santa himself pointing out presents stacked around his kitchen bearing the tag "Merry Christmas, From Your Mom" and the caption says

"Do you know who came last night?" Santa Claus said. "My mom!"

Lynne Truss' new book is a bit of brain-buzzing bash for those who love to parse punctuation marks for sport. For those who find fun in such exercises, here's a little sample she offers in her appendix--a short letter to our dear teacher which can be either complimentary or critical, depending on the way we mark it.

Dear Teacher

We want a teacher who knows what punctuation is all about you are clever people who are not like you admit to being horrible at grammar you have ruined us for all other teachers we will do our best for you we stare out of the window whenever you're not around we feel so lucky this is meant to be.
Love,
Tom and Becky

For both official versions as Lynne Truss scores them, just order up a copy of Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, every punctuation mark counts!.

Apostrophe Apostle: The Girl's Like Spaghetti by Lynn Truss

Problems with when and where to use the apostrophe? As Lynne Truss says,

Don't blame the apostrophe. Blame the people who didn't come up with different marks for the different jobs.

Especially when it comes to the word its.

Whoever those historical grammarians were, they're probably hiding in the witness protection program by now. The misuse of it's has, for some reason, become ever more annoyingly flagrant in recent years.

Yet, in a way it's a natural and understandable error. There are two accepted usages of the "flying comma:" 1) to take the place of the missing letter in a contraction (I'm for I am) and 2) to indicate possession before a noun (John's book). The train wreck for the grammar-challenged comes in the use of the apostrophe with the word it. Faced with the confusion of using the apostrophe with it for both permitted usages, grammarians came down on the side of using the apostrophe to indicate the contraction and never ever using it to show possession. This rule seems straightforward and not that hard to fix in the mind. (IT'S MEANS IT IS. ALWAYS. PERIOD. END OF DISCUSSION.) For some reason, this rule served us well until, well, fairly recently, when the whole grammar train went off the tracks at Junction IT.

Now, mind you, historians of the language might muddy the water a bit. I recall my freshman English professor pointing out that the 's usage to indicate possession actually came from a shortening of the earlier English usage "John, his book" to indicate possession, which gradually contracted into John's book in the interest of brevity. (If you say "John, his book" fast three times, this explanation seems believable.) If this bit of linguistic history is true, then the possessive use of the apostrophe is, er, actually a contractive use of the apostrophe, and so..., um, I guess by logic it's (meaning that belonging to IT) should be correct as well--unless you consider it the neuter pronoun--in which case you can't use the 's because none of the other pronouns are allowed to form the possessive that way! Yikes!

I don't blame author Lynne Truss for not going there. Things are bad enough as they are. Instead, she devotes her latest book to humorous lessons in the use of the apostrophe.

The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage without Apostrophes! uses a kid-friendly format which features large cartoons on facing pages showing the meaning of two phrases or sentences made ambiguous by the misuse or misunderstanding of the apostrophe. One pair of cartoons shows two phrases, "The giant kid's playground" (with the cartoon picturing a giant kid enjoying his very own play place) and "The giant kids' playground (with a bunch of regular kids enjoying a giant place to play). Another double page spread pairs "The dogs like my dad" (with a bunch of dogs doting on Dad) with "The dog's like my dad" (which shows a red-haired dad and his look-alike shaggy red pooch taking a stroll together).

One cute kid pleaser couples "Look! It's behind!" (with kids pointing to a turtle who is finishing the race in last place) and "Look! Its behind!" (with kids pointing to a horse's prominent rear end.) Then there's the sister-friendly pair "Those smelly things are my brother's" (with a girl pointing to her male sibling's stinky sneakers) and "Those smelly things are my brothers!" (with the same girl pointing to her two odoriferous male siblings. An appendix features thumbnails of each cartoon and an explanation of what its caption really means in case the reader is still confused.

Let us hope that The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why You Can't Manage without Apostrophes! enjoys as much success as its predecessor, the children's version of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why Commas Really Do Make a Difference! It's hoped by grammarians that its humorous lessons will be well learned by its readers.