Note, for example, that there is no way to indicate with an isolated letter, or even a group of letters, the sound of u in put – if you don’t see it in the word itself, no other approximation works: ough, oo, eu, eugh … see how nothing works? English has 26 letters to about 43 sounds, and Zebra introduces the idea, in its goofy way, that there could theoretically be more letters.īut now we are to see the book as some kind of controversial contraband, and why? Specifically, on one page a man of no delineated race (and thus we would declare him “white,” I assume) is riding a kind of camel and has a mustache. It gently gets across the key fact that our letters only approximately reflect the language we actually speak. The book is not only entertaining but educational, in ways that a linguist like me especially values. That is just caviar, and is but one of countless similar passages. Or Nutches who haven’t got Nitches will snitch.” So each Nutch in a Nitch has to watch that small Nitch Would like to move into his Nitch very much. The fact there are many more Nutches than Nitches.Įach Nutch in a Nitch knows that some other Nutch These Nutches have troubles, the biggest of which is Who live in small caves, known as Nitches, for hutches. “And NUH is the letter I use to spell Nutches gradually learn to read out the passages themselves: I have especially enjoyed watching my older daughter. The book is a wordfest, and an utter delight to read. It proposes an extra twenty “letters” of the alphabet, each shown as “spelling” the name of some classically Seussian weird animal or object. Like most of the now discontinued books, Zebra is not one of the better-known Seuss titles, but it has always been one of my favorites and has long been a staple at reading time in my home. Here – and frankly, perhaps in this response to pictures in the other books as well – I can’t help seeing something more about gesture and virtue signalling than about genuine concern for shaping young minds. I assume that the problem is with one, or perhaps two, pictures in it that could be interpreted as “Orientalist.” However, I was at first perplexed as to just what was now offensive in On Beyond Zebra and had to page through it carefully. I get that we might not want to be showing kids some of the images in the other books, where the only black people depicted are exotic, subservient “natives,” or the only East Asian is a Chinese person who “eats with sticks” in To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. The Seuss estate has decided to no longer publish it and five other Seuss books because of their racist imagery. Seuss’ On Beyond Zebra that I and my daughters have so enjoyed for years is now officially a collector’s item.
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