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My daughter and I were having one of our usual conversations about the sorry state of her school’s social studies curriculum. She was frustrated that, by 9th grade, they had yet to touch on the 20th century and it didn’t look like this year would be any different.

“I mentioned something about Winston Churchill to my friend J,” she said, “and she didn’t know who he was.”

She'd never heard of Churchill? Never heard his inspirational speeches, spoken with a lisp, of never surrendering to the Nazis? Never seen pictures of him in his blue coveralls, smoking his omnipresent cigar, giving his V for Victory sign? My mind started racing over our trip to England, the Churchill biographies I had read as a result, and the pages I had marked just recently when reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s NO ORDINARY TIME. After a long pause I said, “I just might have to do something about that.” My daughter gave me a big smile. She knew I had just met my next project.

Churchill had captured my attention a few years ago when I had convinced my family that a visit to the Cabinet War Rooms, where Churchill and his staff hunkered down during WWII, was a worthwhile way to spend our last morning in London. As they waved goodbye to their cousins who were off on a more lighthearted tour of Buckingham Palace, I tried to reassure them that they wouldn’t be disappointed. Luckily, I was right.

The self-guided tour was fascinating and we were all pulled right in. We learned a bit about the Blitz, how they made use of the different colored telephones, and how they charted everything out with paper and pins in the map room. It was a morning well spent, topped off by some chocolate cigars from the gift shop.

Is it possible to draw a kid into a book in the same way as that hands on experience? I think so.

In the official brochure of the Imperial War Museum, the photo of Churchill’s bedroom looks like this:



When I visited, I snapped a few photos, despite the darkness. The photo I took of Churchill's bedroom gives a slightly different view.

Notice anything in the bottom of my photo? Yes, I would definitely want the chamber pot included. Not only is it a visual kids would love but it reveals a lot about the time, place and circumstances. They were in a bunker because those were real bombs flying above; the closest bathroom was a up a floor or two. It would make a good contrast to talking about the conditions that FDR lived under at the same time and a great way to talk about the situation in Britain and the United States.

If done with the right approach, I'm confident kids would be interested. Books on Franklin D. Roosevelt certainly do well. What about a book that explores their relationship? But then why is there only one book on Churchill in the children’s section of my local library? Is it a gold mine waiting to be explored or a subject purposefully passed over? And there is the ever-present curriculum problem. If it is not a subject kids will study in school, the editors don’t think it will sell. Does this always need to be the first consideration regardless of a writer's knowledge or enthusiasm for a subject? More on this in another post.

Please go play FreeRice right now. It’s a great example of using gaming for some serious good.

• Click on the answer that best defines the word.
• If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word.
• For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

“FreeRice has a custom database containing thousands of words at varying degrees of difficulty. There are words appropriate for people just learning English and words that will challenge the most scholarly professors. In between are thousands of words for students, business people, homemakers, doctors, truck drivers, retired people… everyone!

FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level. You then determine a more exact level for yourself as you play. When you get a word wrong, you go to an easier level. When you get three words in a row right, you go to a harder level. This one-to-three ratio is best for keeping you at the ‘outer fringe’ of your vocabulary, where learning can take place.

There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.”

Last week, after Terryl Given’s piece about Mormonism and politics, I started to wonder about one of my favorite Mormons, Orson Scott Card. I’m not a huge Science Fiction fan, but the Ender’s Game series captivated me as a young teen and I still list the series among my favorite books. Below, in an excerpt from Given’s book People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture is a look at Card in light of his religion.

Orson Scott Card has been called the Mormon “who to this point best — and most radically fulfills the great prophetic hopes for a world-class as well as genuinely Mormon literature.” One of the most prolific and arguably the best science fiction writer alive, Card is best known for his Enders saga, the first volume of which won an unprecedented doubleheader, scoring both the Nebula and the Hugo awards, as did its sequel, in a feat still unequaled (Ender’s Game, 1986; Speaker for the Dead, 1987). Some of his corpus is recognizably Mormon in fairly conspicuous ways. Saints and Folk of the Fringe, for instance, represent direct engagement, the former historical and the latter futuristic, with Mormonism itself. His Tales of Alvin Maker series (six volumes and counting) is a thinly veiled version of Joseph Smith’s life, cast as fantasy that reconceptualizes American history. Earlier, he published a five volume science fiction series clearly based on the Book of Mormon (Homecoming, 1992–1996).

(more…)

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Definitely check out this Max and Pinky ecard that the good people at Random House put together. It's got a game where Max and Pinky have to gather as many marshmallows as they can before the critters all take them away. What could be more fun than that! I'm having a hard time thinking of anything...

Enjoy!

Proving that even testing your knowledge of the placement of U.S. states can be a fun game, Marylaine Block’s Neat New Stuff points us to Stateris-USA. I finished in 11 minutes on medium, mainly because I wasn’t sure which way to turn Rhode Island. You can also test your knowlege of Africa, Europe, France, the Netherlands, and the UK.

There are some fun links in the lefthand navigation, too, that create maps with a message of your choosing using smoke signals, crop circles, and the “Hollywood” sign.

By Anatoly Liberman

Etymologists constantly lament their fate: either the word to be explained was not recorded early enough (a typical case with vulgarisms and slang) or it is isolated (some monster like catawampus), or it has a sufficient number of allied forms but they are so similar that their semantic history cannot be traced (this circumstance—to give one example—handicaps the research into the origin of dwarf: like their English cognate, German Zwerg, Swedish dverg, etc., denote a short person, but how this combinations of sounds acquired its meaning is hard to decide ). The list is long enough for composing a full-fledged elegy “The Etymologist’s Complaint.” By contrast, an overwhelming amount of material may also pose problems. A case in point is the children’s verse of the eena—meena—mina—mo type. It has been recorded in numerous countries from east to west—naturally, in different form, but the first word is more or less the same everywhere. Although eena and its kin resemble one, they are too far from it to be qualified as its “garbled” or “corrupted” variants. Nor are meena, mina, and mo less obscure than eena. Why some human or beast has to be caught by the toe is equally puzzling but will not concern us. I will touch only on the English word eena and its analogues.

Our first sojourn will be in the Yorkshire Dales, where sheep are (or were at the end of the 19th century) scored as follows: yain, taien, tethera, (m)ethera, pi(m)p (the first five numerals). Another variant is eina, peina, para, pattera, pith. The origin of those numerals has been subjected to a long and fruitful discussion, whose main result is that we observe here a relic of an ancient British (Celtic) system of counting. Since to modern speakers yain, taien, etc. are meaningless words, their form is unstable and tends to vary from region to region. Some of the lists are mere gibberish, with English words replacing the original numerals, and rhyming words invented by informants. Complications arise when we cross the ocean and discover a similar string of numerals in use among the native population in North America, for example, een, teen, tother, fither, pimp, with the variant eeny, teeny, tuthery, fethery, fip. The American (Wawena) numerals were published in 1867. According to an informed opinion, those scores should be regarded as tally-marks rather than numbers; they were used in counting by fives, tens, or twenties. Presumably, they were “brought to New England by English colonists and used by them in dealing with the Indians in counting fish, beaver skins, and other articles of traffic. When the memory of their origin was lost, the Anglo-Americans believed them to be Indian numerals, and the Indians probably believed them to be good English.”

According to other hypotheses, the home of the phrase eena, meena, mina, mo is French Canadian or a language spoken on an island off the West Coast of Africa. Both hypotheses are fanciful. One should never tire of repeating that the idea of borrowing has value only when the way of penetration is known. In the world of words, tales, and customs, seeming convergences abound. Some words, plots, and rituals often have close analogue in different regions. It is easy and tempting to suggest borrowing. Positing loans without identifying intermediaries is a waste of time. The Celtic origin of sheep scoring is nearly certain. Incidentally, not only sheep and not only in Yorkshire are counted this way. The unresolved question is the connection between the American list and eena, meena, mina, mo. The resemblance between the rhyme and eina, peina, para, pattera; yain, taien, tethera, (m)ethera; eeny, teeny, tuthery, fethery is minimal. Only the first word is almost the same, and, as pointed out, it is such everywhere. Far from the English speaking world, Russian girls begin their games with the words eniki, beniki (eni-, pronounced like Engl. any). The second words (meena and beniki) must have been coined as rhyming partners of eena and beniki, but where did the first ones come from? The Old English for one was pronounced an (with a as in father), in Middle English it changed to on (with o as in British pawn); neither can be called a phonetic variant of eena. Equally slight is the similarity between eniki (after we subtract the meaningless ending -ki) and Russian odin “one” (stress on the second syllable; its older form began with ted- or yed-). Referring eeny to some “ancient British numeral” like eina suggests itself (obviously, a reasonable solution), but why wasn’t the entire sequence reproduced? Why only the first word? Children’s folklore often preserves remnants of ancient incantations, but no such incantation has been found. As far as we can judge, no magic formula ever began with eeny or eniki. Russian etymological dictionaries do not discuss eniki; the OED calls eena a nonsense word. To be sure, all is nonsense that we do not understand. Folklorists believe that the English counting out rhyme is relatively recent. If this is true, the emergence of eeny and its closeness to words like eniki makes the riddle of its origin even harder.

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