New Reading Words for a New Generation

This morning, Ian was reading from some of the new books I gave him yesterday, and there was a blurb about Bill Gates being the world's youngest billionaire in history. To my delight, Ian struggled with "Gates," and absolutely mangled "Microsoft" (something more like "Microfost"). He identified our nation, in the same paragraph, as the "Unit-ed States". There's something very moving about seeing the instant-recognition mantras of our age being creatively mis-rendered by a young American reader - almost an "Emperor's New Clothes" phenomenon.

(March 12, 2011)