From: Mary Ann Gilpatrick <MGilpatrick>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:45:33 -0700

Interesting. I always assumed it was a concept from Yissish.

(As in: a husband is not to look at, a husband is to get.)

Mary Ann Gilpatrick

These are interesting ones. The Krauss books certainly make the claim that they represent children's imaginations--Krauss thanks the children and teachers in some specific schools in A Hole Is to Dig, suggesting that these definitions are actually ones created by real children. And maybe they are--but the copy i have certainly doesn't literally say so, which i find very interesting indeed. Even if they do come originally from real children, i think the claim to represent real childlike thinking is somewhat undermined even by the way these sayings of children are being presented here. They are merchandise for sale--marked as being valued by adults and therefore for the children adults buy books for, and marketed as such. So they are transformed into a sort of commodity, as the sayings of children rarely in real life are. They are even copyrighted, my editions tell me, by Ruth Krauss--so if indeed she did first hear children say these things, she has either stolen their work from them or transformed it into something genuinely her intellectual property (and she certainly never credits any specific child for any one of the sayings--as if some one child's way of phrasing something represents the way all children think?)
Received on Wed 22 Jul 2009 01:45:33 PM CDT