#6 Quadrooped!

In the past week or so, two college-educated adults have picked up my latest middle-grade novel and read the title aloud: Jeremy Cabbage and the Living Museum of Human Oddballs and Quadruped Delights. A mouthful, I know. But when they got to Quadruped, they faltered a bit, and then read the word as if it were two, rather than three syllables, as in -- quadrooped. This, as you might imagine, is disheartening, especially so because one of them is an elementary school teacher. Good heavens! What is happening? While quadruped might not come up in our daily conversation, it certainly can't be considered arcane, can it? It's not a word like chthonic, after all, or analemmatic. (And for you dirty-minded types, analemmatic is not what you think it might mean.)


I could have used four-footed in the title, I know, but why should I have? There is a perfectly good word -- quadruped -- that means exactly that. Besides, with its combination of soft vowels and hard consonants it reminds us how playful our language can be; it's fun to say, and, until recently, I thought, to read. This is part of the joy of language, no? And this joy is what I want to pass on to kids. It's one of the reasons I write.

When The Transmogrification of Roscoe Wizzle came out in paperback, the publisher suggested we change the title simply to Roscoe Wizzle. When these kinds of issues come up, as they often do in publishing, I try to be flexible, but in this case I was obdurate (or should I say, stubborn?) Why? Because a year or two before, during a school visit, a boy had tugged excitedly on my shirtsleeve and said, "The Transmogrification of Roscoe Wizzle. Transmogrification! When I hear that word, it . . .it . . . it just makes me want to read the book!" Here was a boy who was experiencing the fun of his own language. Why deny him, and others like him, this very deep pleasure? By the way, I can't tell you the number of adults who have mispronounced transmogrify. Kids seem to get it right every time.

Recently, the second Evangeline came out in paperback as well. Before I realized what was happening, the title was changed from Evangeline Mudd and the Great Mink Escapade to Evangeline Mudd and the Great Mink Rescue. Escapade was apparently too difficult. I wish now I had been with it enough to make a fuss. To me, this kind of change demonstrates a lack of faith in our children. And when adults start to lack faith, the bar can only go down, down down.

All in all, this is very dismaying. In fact, I'm feeling . . let's see . . . what's the right word? Yes! I've got it! I'm feeling quadrooped!