How to use this Page

We (unintentionally) started a debate about the origin of the word “buckaroo” with our quiz Can you speak American? last week. Richard Bailey, author of Speaking American, argues that it comes from the West African language Efik. Here OED editor Dr. Katrin Thier argues that the origin isn’t quite so clear.

By Dr. Katrin Thier

The origin of the word buckaroo is difficult to establish and is still a matter of debate. In the sense ‘cowboy’ it first appears in the early 19th century, written bakhara in the earliest source currently known to us, but used alongside other words of clearly Spanish origin. Later variants include baccaro, buccahro, and buckhara. On the face of it, a derivation from Spanish vaquero ‘cowboy’ looks likely, especially as the initial sound of the Spanish word is essentially the same as b- in English. The stress of the English word was apparently originally on the second syllable, as in Spanish, and only shifted to the final syllable later.

However, there is evidence from the Caribbean for a number of very similar and much earlier forms, such as bacchararo (1684), bockorau (1737), and backaroes (1740, plural), used by people of African descent to denote white people. This word then spreads from the Caribbean islands to the south of the North American continent. From the end of the 18th century, it is often contracted and now usually appears as buckra or backra, but trisyllablic forms such as buckera still occur in the 19th century. This word was brought from Africa and derives from the trisyllabic Efik word mbakára ‘white man, European’. Efik is a (non-Bantu) Niger-Congo language spoken around Calabar, a former slave port in what is now southern Nigeria.

Given the multi-ethnic and multilingual make-up of the south of the United States, it seems conceivable that similar words of different origin could meet and interact, influencing each other to generate new forms and meanings. However, a number of difficulties remain in explaining the change of sense and also the varying stress pattern if the word of Efik origin is assumed to be the sole origin of buckaroo ‘cowboy’.

This is a word that we look forward very much to researching in detail for the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary currently in progress. We would welcome any earlier examples of the word in the meaning ‘cowboy’, if any readers know of any.

Dr. Katrin Thier is Senior Etymology Editor at the Oxford English Dictionary.

iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast

The volcano that spewed ash into the Icelandic skies and disrupted world air travel has a name that’s pretty difficult to pronounce and pretty difficult to spell; it’s Eyjafjallajökull. This evidently means “island mountain glacier.” Nothing about volcanoes, fire or ash in that word.

The volcano that was first called a volcano, however, does have a name relating to its fiery fame. Mount Etna is on the island of Sicily which is the island that the boot of Italy is kicking. The name Etna is thought—according to Adrian Room’s book Placenames of the World—to have originated from a Phoenician word attuna meaning “furnace.” He dismisses the theory that Etna is from a Greek source meaning “I burn.”

Mount Etna holds a place in Roman mythology as the furnace of the god of fire and blacksmithing. That god’s name was Vulcan hence the word volcano which appeared as an English word in 1613 in the travel writings of Samuel Purchas. So from that day to this travel and volcanoes seem to be strangely linked.

By Anatoly Liberman

An odd bundle of meanings exists in some Indo-European languages. The first thread in it connects “praise” and “permit,” and this is where we will begin. The verb allow has two senses that today cannot be distinguished without an effort, namely, “permit” and “assign, grant” (hence allowance). Both are from Old French alouer ~ allouer, in which the reflexes (continuations) of two Latin verbs were confused (or blended): allocare “allot, allocate” and allaudare (the latter traceable to ad + laudare and familiar to English-speakers from laud and its derivatives laudatory, laudable, and laudation). A prefix may change the meaning of a verb radically. Yet laudare meant “to praise” even with ad-/al- before it, so why do Old French al (l)ouer and Engl. allow mean “to permit”? (Modern French allouer means “grant, allocate” and in some contexts “allow.”) The sense development is usually reconstructed so: from “praise” to “approve, assign with approval” and to “permit.” If this is how the events unfolded, the French verb underwent a certain degradation of meaning in comparison with its Latin etymon. We won’t worry about its fate but remember that no chasm separates “praise” from “permit.”

The situation in Germanic is more complicated. In Middle High German, the verb loben meant both “praise” and “vow, swear,” that is, “promise solemnly” (today only geloben has the second meaning). Old Engl. lofian also meant “praise,” but leaf, a noun related to it, meant “permission,” and we still say by your leave. This leave has nothing to do with the verb leave “depart, quit,” though most people think that in take one’s leave and a leave of absence they hear an echo of the verb. Old Icelandic lofa meant both “praise” and “permit.” Thus, what we observe between Latin and French as a process is represented in Germanic as a state. The root of Engl. (be)lieve, German (g)lauben, and their cognates elsewhere in Germanic is likewise akin to leave “permission,” though to have faith in something is not exactly the same as to praise or allow it to happen. Finally, the unquestionable cognates of lofian, lofa, and the rest are English archaic lief “beloved” (by contrast, German lieb “dear” is a common word) and love (cf. German Liebe) The Germanic bundle consists of “praise,” “permit,” “believe,” and “love.”

Faced with such a semantic tangle, language historians try to extricate the nucleus from which all the meanings sprouted (of course, this is the goal of reconstructing all protoforms). Unfortunately, one can begin almost anywhere and arrive at feasible conclusions. 1) Love presupposes trust (faith); we believe in the object of our longing, praise the person we adore and permit him or her to do what they like. 2) Or we permit a certain act or allow someone to do something and praise, believe in, and love the results. 3) Or we praise something and permit it. The results are worthy of our love, and we believe in them. Other variants are easy to concoct. Allow came from allaudare, but in an excellent etymological dictionary of Old Icelandic it is said that “permit” preceded “praise,” rather than the other way around Even the most authoritative statements should be taken

iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast

It has been sixty years since the bikini came to world attention.

In the summer of 1945 the Second World War was brought to an end with the two explosions of nuclear weapons over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The following summer the US military decided it would be a good idea to do a few more experiments with these kind of bombs to see just what happened when you did set one off.

So far there had only been three such explosions.  The first took place in New Mexico and was just to show that the thing would actually work—the next two were—as one might put it—used in anger.

The place chosen for the testing was a group of small islands well away from most everything except the Pacific Ocean.

If you look at a map and find Australia and then trace north you’ll come to a fairly major island called Papua New Guinea. Then shoot off to the north-east for two thousand miles and you’ll come to the Marshal Islands. In the north-western area of the Marshal Islands there are a group of islands surrounding a lagoon.

This is the Bikini Atoll.

The biggest island is only something over a square mile or so.

Before the bombs were set off there were actually residents on the islands, but they were thoughtfully removed before two explosions shook their world, one from the air, the other from underwater.

I say that these people were thoughtfully removed, but in fact there is a movement these days to try and bring world attention to the descendants of people like these, who were forcibly removed from their island homes.  Check out the book Island of Shame by David Vine.

With respect to the bomb tests, as might be expected, they caught world attention and just happened to be coincident with the emergence in France of a new style of swimsuit formed in two pieces.

But it wasn’t until the following summer, in 1947 that two French guys took advantage of the fad and introduced their skimpier style swimsuit and named it a bikini on the theory that it was going to attract as much attention as last summer’s explosions.

It took another winter before the English speaking world picked up the word—in print at least—The Oxford English Dictionary first citation is in Newsweek in June 1948 in a piece that actually suggests a countertrend against the skimpy bikini.

From what I see around the old swimming hole, the countertrend hasn’t made much progress.

There is an interesting side note here in that there exists a kind of one piece bathing suit called a monokini, as if the leading B I of bikini meant bi as in “two” for the two pieces of the bikini.

iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast

Here’s a word where the etymological authorities appear to be at odds.

From The American Heritage Dictionary: “hostage, noun; a person held by one party in a conflict as security…etymology: Middle English, from Old French, probably from host…”

And from John Ayto’s Word Origins: “despite its similarity, hostage is not related to any of the English words host.”

The Oxford English Dictionary appears to come down on the same side as Ayto while Merriam Webster looks as if it agrees with American Heritage. Everybody agrees though that the roots of the word go back to Latin.

Although I’m sure both American Heritage and Merriam Webster had all kinds of etymological information to back up their opinions, they show less of it than does the OED and John Ayto and so the non-association between hostage and host appears from my vantage point to be the more credible.

Both sources walk us back through French into Latin where the word for hostage was obsidem or obsidatus. The OED explains that when hostage first appeared in Old French, where we got it from, there, as in Latin, it didn’t have an “h” in front of it; it was ostage.

In those very olden days a hostage wasn’t someone taken in a terrorist attack.  Instead, powerful men gave their subordinates and often family members in hostage to someone with whom they had made a deal. When the conditions of the deal were fulfilled—say, pay money or move your troops—the hostages were released.

In the mean time the hostages were still important people and had to be treated as befit their station in life.  The OED speculates that the “h” in hostage got tacked on because this old style of hostage got associated with a whole family of words that arose out of the Latin hospitem meaning both “host” and “guest” as well as “stranger” and “foreigner.”

That Latin hospitem gave us hospitality, hospital as well as host so that if you were required to show hospitality and be a good host to your ostage you might start calling them a hostage instead.

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon looks at the word “stimulus”.

I wonder if I am the only one who finds it humorous that the word stimulus is derived from a Latin word that means ‘a goad for driving cattle’ (at least that’s what Skinner’s Origin of Medical Terms says). The OED doesn’t seem to fully agree with Skinner on this, stating in their etymology ‘Originally a mod.L. use (in medical books) of L. stimulus goad, of doubtful origin; perh. f. root *sti- in stilus’.

Is it possible that Henry Alan Skinner foresaw the future use of stimulus as a word that would be tied to our current massive financial package, and thought to include the bit about ‘driving cattle’ in his etymology as a way of expressing his contempt for either the members of congress who will vote for the bill, the bankers who are crying out for its passage, or the public who doesn’t fully understand it (but who incessantly talk about it anyway)? I don’t know what Skinner’s political leanings were, but this seems unlikely, as his book was published in 1949.

No matter what its roots are, no one can deny that the word is really enjoying its time in the limelight. One can hardly begrudge it, as stimulus has not has the most glamorous career in our language. It entered our language in 1684, and its various senses over the centuries have mainly been of the medical or scientific variety – good workmanlike words, but nothing that anyone would get too excited about. It is not the oldest of its family in English - stimulator and stimulatrix, for instance, both appeared some 70 years earlier.

But whether it has a noble pedigree or an exciting definition is beside the point; we are privy to watching a word shift and take on new meaning before our eyes, and that should be interesting enough. For instance, there is only one instance of the phrase stimulus package in the entire OED (it comes, delightfully enough, in the citations for the entry on misgauge). But the New York Times has used this particular phrase over 400 times in the past three months, and I am certain that it is not going away any time soon.

Stimulus will unintentionally be used incorrectly by those people (myself included) who don’t understand exactly what all the billions and trillions of dollars are supposed to do. It will intentionally be used incorrectly by those who want to influence the political fate of the stimulus package. It will be used in ways that are relatively foreign to how it has been used before, in ways that will only be judged correct or incorrect in the future. And possibly some of these new usages and meanings will stick to it, and will be documented in dictionaries to come.

Even if the word is, as the OED claims, of doubtful origin, I am sure that its parents are very proud.

By Anatoly Liberman

Interjections of all kinds are harder to trace to their origin than many people think (consider wow, ouch, oops, and even hey, hi, ho). The history of hello poses no formidable difficulties, but, as usual in etymological studies, there is a hitch. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest citation of hello has the date 1883 because the main entry appears under hollo ~ hollow (1542); hello is said to be akin to holla (1523) and borrowed from French; it was an exclamation calling attention or meaning “stop.” The other forms are holloa, halloa, hullo, hulloa, and halloo. They look like so many spelling variants of the same word.

The first tentative explanation of the origin of hallo connected the English word with French au loup, au loup, the cry heard in the chase for setting dogs on the wolf. This derivation, though almost certainly wrong, is realistic, for in English the language of the hunt owes a great deal to the Anglo-French of the Normans. The Middle English verbs hallow and its near doublet halloo “to pursue with shouts” were used for inciting dogs; both also seem to be of French origin. In addition, we find French halali, still another sportsman’s cry. The broader picture suggests that all those words are sound imitative. For example, alala existed in Hebrew and classical Greek, and several variants of ala ~ ola ~ ole are well-known from the Romance languages. Even French aller “to go,” supposedly, an alteration of Latin ambulare, is believed to have originated in some imperative like allele, while allons “let us go” is not too far removed from (h)allo. The plot thickens the moment we realize that, at least today, hello (whatever the spelling) is used to greet people (hence its adoption in telephone communications), rather than urge dogs on, and especially when we look beyond English and French.

I never miss a chance to refer to The Century Dictionary. It is a splendid but sadly underestimated work. Here is what Charles P. G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, wrote under hallo (I have expanded his abbreviations): “Such forms, being mere syllables to call attention, are freely varied for sonorous effect; hallo, hello, halloo may be regarded as the modern representatives of the common Anglo-Saxon [= Old English] ea la or eala, used similarly to call attention, whether loudly from afar, like hallo, hello, halloo, or quietly from near by, like hello colloquially, or like modern ah, oh, well, and similar preliminary syllables. Anglo-Saxon ea represents Engl. ah or oh, and la is Engl. lo. These forms, in hunting use, are represented by Old French halle, an interjection of cheering or setting on of a dog, Modern French haler ‘set (dogs upon one), encourage with shouts’. So German hallo, halloh, perhaps after the English. The form hallow, as a noun or verb, with accent on the first syllable is a variant of hollow, hollo, holla, now scarcely used as an interjection, and is in so far different from hallo, hello…. Cf. hullabaloo.” We will not compare hello with hullabaloo because a special post was at one time devoted to hullabaloo, but will wonder at the generosity of The Century Dictionary that allowed its etymologists to write so much about even such an outwardly insignificant word as hallo. Scott’s most interesting idea is that Old English had an interjection strikingly similar to hello. However, he does not say that its reception may have been facilitated by the existence of a native one. His phrases about ah ~ oh representing Old Engl. ea and about the Old English phrase being represented by Old French halle” are unclear (what is “represent”?). We would also want to know why the English forms surfaced only in the middle period and why they were invariably spelled with h-. Are they French newcomers that supplanted eala?

Further complications confront us on German soil. According to a once popular theory, German hallo goes back to the verb halen ~ holen “fetch, get,” a cognate of Engl. haul (Engl. hale “draw, pull” is a borrowing of French holer, but in French this verb is of Germanic origin; Engl. hale “greet” is a different word, related to whole). Allegedly, its ancient meaning was “to call,” and the forms hala, hola arose when long a (that is, a vowel as in Engl. father) was added to the imperative, with stress on the second syllable; the reinforcing particle a has indeed been recorded. Those words, as the story goes, were used in calling a ferryman, asking someone in the house to come out, and so forth. The problem with this ingenious hypothesis is that German halon ~ holon never meant “call.” Only Latin calare “call” and its Greek cognate suggest that such a meaning existed. But the kinship of halon with calare cannot be proved: the sounds match, whereas the meanings do not. Modern German researchers treat the old theory with respect but without enthusiasm. I find it as hard to accept as Scott’s (hallo from Old Engl. eala).

Is it possible that practically the same interjection in English, French, and German comes from three different sources? This would be the conclusion if we derived them from eala, an onomatopoeic shout, and hal- + a respectively. At first blush, such a conclusion seems to be unlikely. I think it will remain unacceptable even if we keep blushing. Eala should be ruled out because it lacks h-. Halon fails because the necessary meaning did not exist. So onomatopoeia remains as the only viable (“sustainable,” to use the latest buzzword) solution. Yet it may be that folk etymology and the existence of similar interjections (some primitive shouts like alala) helped the French word to stay in English. Scott’s conjecture that German hallo is from English has not been supported by factual evidence. Language contacts played a noticeable role in the history of the European word hallo, but the direction of borrowing is not always clear. Etymologists often work in isolation, and it is a pity that English scholars are sometimes satisfied with their proposals and their German colleagues with theirs, in disregard of what happens in the languages of their neighbors. We say hello to one another across state borders, but the root of the greeting has not been exposed.

ShareThis

By Anatoly Liberman

Spelling reform and genitals will keep the rubric “gleanings” afloat forever. In connection with my series of posts on the oddest English spellings (which will be continued), I received several questions about dyslexia and orthography. Since I am unacquainted with the neural aspects of dyslexia, I cannot have a professional opinion on this subject, but the main divide seems to be between alphabetic languages and those using hieroglyphs (such as Chinese) rather than between languages like Finnish, in which the word’s aural Gestalt and visual image correspond remarkably well, and languages like English, in which the spelling of numerous words is unpredictable (bury, build, bosom, choir, till ~ until, and so forth), for different parts of the brain control our mastery of letters versus symbols (in this case, pictures).

Now to the genitals. Thanks to the correspondent who provided a quotation of dildoes from John Donne’s “Elegy 2: The Anagram” (1599). Those lines confirm the fact that the word was well-known in Shakespeare’s days. While our British correspondent was watching “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” an idea occurred to her that the opprobrious sense of knob had existed for centuries. My information on this subject is sparse. Knob “penis” was indeed known in the second half of the 17th century, but neither Shakespeare nor his younger contemporaries, whose language is often coarser than his, seem to have used it, even in puns, while reproducing the speech of their time. Nor do I find it in the old classical dictionaries of slang. Apparently, it reemerged after a long period of underworld existence only in the 20th century.

By way of compensation, I will add a note to my old post on the origin of Engl. brain. I suggested in it that brain is akin to bran and that the earliest meaning of the word was approximately “refuse,” not too different from “gray matter.” At that time I did not remember that 400 years ago the brain was supposed to produce semen, because both substances look rather similar. Hence the allusion to “brains between legs.” As regards Italian fiasco, I am sure that, contrary to a guess of our correspondent, far’ fico and far’ fiasco are unrelated. Some discussion of the Italian word (in connection with Engl. fig) can be found in my An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction; fig is mentioned in the entry on the F-word. To the best of my knowledge, far’ fiasco had no scurrilous overtones when it was coined. Fiasco (this is an answer to a different question) can, of course, have entered English directly from Italian, but if an Italian word (except for art terms and those pertaining to Italian realities) is also current in French and if the chronology does not militate against such a conclusion, it is safer to suggest that English took it over from French rather than Italian. I will return to fiasco in a different context.

In my etymological database, only one citation on poontang turned up. G. Legman wrote in the journal American Speech 25, 1950, p.234: “The Southern term poontang, for sexual intercourse ‘especially between Negro & white’ (Wentworth), is popularly and mistakenly believed to be a Negro word, perhaps of African origin. Actually, as pointed out by the well-known translator Keene Wallis, poontang is merely a heavily nasalized Creole pronunciation of the French word putain, whore, and undoubtedly spread through the South from French-speaking Louisiana. Wallis reports it as current in Missouri about ‘1915’.” This is followed by twelve quotations (but not from Wallis), three of them from Look Homeward, Angel (1929; Poon Tang). Few words are more detrimental to an etymology than undoubtedly and doubtlessly, but the derivation from putain is not bad, and the southern provenance of poontang seems to be correct.

A question was asked about the adverb yet. It concerns usage, but the development of yet also has a historical dimension. Our correspondent finds the sentence “Has Lucy come yet?” strange. It sounds perfectly idiomatic to me. In Modern English, yet has numerous meanings, and in two situations it alternates with “substitutes.” One is still: he is still here ~ he is not here yet. The other is already: he has already come ~ has he come yet? Apparently, the latter alternation is not universal; otherwise, there would have been no query. A few things about past usage may be of interest. Still is an adjective (“quiet, motionless”) and an adverb, as above. In Shakespeare’s language still meant “always” (“Thou still hast been the father of good news”). In some British dialects, yet occurs as still was in the 16th and 17th century. Consequently, it may be that in Wordsworth’s sonnet addressed to Milton: “So didst thou travel on life’s common way / In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heart / The lowliest duties on herself did lay,” yet is misunderstood by modern readers, for Wordsworth may have meant “and always (ever) thy heart.”

Extinction of Languages. The disappearance of every language, like the disappearance of every species, is an irreparable loss, and it is a good thing that in the 20th century many languages have been saved from extinction and in a few cases even revived (Hebrew is an anthologized example). But it is also a fact that languages, and not necessarily endangered ones, those with few speakers left, have been dying throughout history. Take Hittite, Hunnish, and Gothic. They were spoken by tens of thousands of people forming powerful tribal unions. What is left are a heap of clay tablets, a few biblical fragments, and the like, while from preliterate societies (to which the Huns belonged) almost nothing has remained. Vandals have a bad press, though at one time they were not worse than, say, the Goths. The Vandals are gone, and, but for a few names and words recorded by the Romans, we would have had no idea of their language. History is cruel; however, it is also unpredictable: it sometimes spares the weak and destroys the strong.

Etymologies. How are Engl. bold and Old Icelandic ballr related, considering that the Icelandic word meant “frightful, dangerous, fatal?” Adjectives often refer to a quality possessed by an individual and the effect this quality has on others. Here we deal with courage and its results: a stout-hearted person is “bold,” whereas his boldness is “dangerous” to others. Can Engl. evil be related to Latin evilescere “to become vile, worthless, despicable,” and, if such a possibility exists, can certain conclusions be drawn with relation to the writings of early English saints? Our correspondent is correct in isolating the root of vilis “vile” in the Latin verb (e- is a prefix). This structure excludes its affinity to evil, but any influence of this relatively rare Latin verb on the Old English adjective should also be ruled out, because the original form of evil was yfil (the modern pronunciation of the stressed vowel is a “Kentism”) and because its cognates, beginning with Gothic, already had the meaning it has today. A medieval scholar would have been delighted to catch at the similarity between evil and evilescere, but by the time umlaut changed u in ubil- (the reconstructed but secure protoform of evil) to y, let alone by the Middle English period (when Old Engl. long y yielded e), all the works cited in the letter had been written and become canon. Ubil-, though pronounced with -v-, did not sound like Latin evil- and would not have inspired even the most ingenious thinker of the Middle Ages. The literature on counting-out rhymes is vast. As always, I am grateful for every tip, but, while writing about eena-meena, I included among my references only those works that deal with the origin of the relevant words, and such works are not many

Pronunciation and grammar. (I won’t repeat the questions, for they can be guessed from the answers.) Unless the norm has changed in recent years, the first vowel in Coventry has the value of o in on. It is true that the o in womb is not identical with its counterpart in woman. But since I do not use phonetic symbols in this blog, I disregarded the vowels’ respective duration. Food and foot are distinguished in the same way (the first oo designates a longer sound). I doubt that anyone acquainted with Emily Bronte’s novel pronounces wuthering, as in Wuthering Heights, with the vowel of strut, though the name Wuthering does have such a vowel. It was good to hear that the OED allows shrank, my past tense of shrink, to exist. I am aware of the fact that in American English the common past form of shrink is shrunk but feel quite comfortable with my slightly idiosyncratic grammar. There is no way I can keep abreast of the times. Most people around me say shined where I say shone (my shone used to rhyme gone, and when I finally made it rhyme with lone, it was too late: shined replaced both). Likewise, I refuse to say plead-pled and stick to pleaded. Little restaurants in my area post the coy apology: “Excuse us: we are slightly old-fashioned.” I am afraid I should carry a board on my breast with a similar message.

Antedatings and contested etymologies. Thanks to Stephen Goranson for his information about the first occurrences of fiasco and snob. Snob remains a word that reached London around the 1770’s. The story connecting the introduction of fiasco with a bad performance by Biancolelli, the harlequin, has been repeated many times, and I knew it. I cannot disprove it, but long experience has taught me to treat such tales with great distrust. When it comes to etymology, they usually turn out to be wrong. One can imagine that far’ fiasco had existed before the actor’s poor performance and that he deliberately carried a bottle around his neck, a good precautionary measure for all of us, whether comedians or etymologists.

ShareThis

A Day with No Crayons
by Elizabeth Rusch; illustrated by Chad Cameron

Rising Moon

First, a lesson on how to remove crayons from walls. And another. Importantly, you get your budding Picasso to do this greasy work. I say the punishment's gotta clean up the crime.

If the Mommy in this story did that, however, we wouldn't get to see daughter Liza's eyes open to the color around her after her precious crayons are taken away. Her world turns gray, thanks to Cameron's deft interpretation of the text.

Liza starts to see jolts of color--first toothpaste, then mud on a playground, and finally flowers in the park. Soon, she's off creating again, mushing leaves of different hues into an improvised tree drawing, or scraping a brick against the sidewalk.

We learn her favorite crayon colors, note a few homages to artists like Jackson Pollock, root for her to keep exploring--and wonder who she thinks is going to get the stains off her clothes.

Rush has written a sweet testament to the irrepressible creativity in children, tossing in a dash of rebelliousness for added fun.

Rating: *\*\*\

A Day with No Crayons
by Elizabeth Rusch; illustrated by Chad Cameron

Rising Moon

First, a lesson on how to remove crayons from walls. And another. Importantly, you get your budding Picasso to do this greasy work. I say the punishment's gotta clean up the crime.

If the Mommy in this story did that, however, we wouldn't get to see daughter Liza's eyes open to the color around her after her precious crayons are taken away. Her world turns gray, thanks to Cameron's deft interpretation of the text.

Liza starts to see jolts of color--first toothpaste, then mud on a playground, and finally flowers in the park. Soon, she's off creating again, mushing leaves of different hues into an improvised tree drawing, or scraping a brick against the sidewalk.

We learn her favorite crayon colors, note a few homages to artists like Jackson Pollock, root for her to keep exploring--and wonder who she thinks is going to get the stains off her clothes.

Rush has written a sweet testament to the irrepressible creativity in children, tossing in a dash of rebelliousness for added fun.

Rating: *\*\*\