I got to see Jamie Lee Curtis talk about her books and her life at the California Library Association's Annual Conference this past weekend. Now we all know how MotherReader feels about celebrity authors, and on the whole I agree with her, but I do like Jamie Lee Curtis.
The stupendous part of this piece of luck was this: she read her brand-new manuscript to us, one that's not even in the hands of the artist yet. I didn't record it or anything, which would have been unethical and plus a pain to transcribe. But it's called Big Words for Little People, and it glories in words like "Stupendous! Absurd! Intelligence! Consequences!"
I love language, especially big words, which are often expunged from children's books on the basis that they're too big. Pfft. Try singing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious with a four-year-old and you learn that no word is too big for them to pronounce. And the beef with words being too big for them to understand . . . well, that's what context is for. Seriously, ferreting out the meaning of words from context clues is a skill they're going to need as they go into school. Let's have more big words, shall we?
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