“Interesting little part in this book, an adult is reading a frightening picture book to a young child.
I’ll summarize as best as I can remember.
Adult 1: Don’t you think that book might be a little too scary?
Adult 2: It’s okay. Picture books all do the same thing. They reinforce rules because the child in the story violates the rules and then ends up confronted with something scary. Although at the same time, it encourages children to break the rules. Because who doesn’t want to have an adventure?
It’s so funny because I was having a similar discussion with some friends yesterday.
I felt, as a kid, motivated to read stuff that was a little…outside the rules. If it had cussing in it, or if the characters were doing something they really shouldn’t. Harris and Me by Gary Paulsen was a good example. When I looked it up, I found this review:
Seriously? This book was terrible!
The first thing you notice when you pick up this book is the title ‘Harris and Me’. Okay, that’s not even proper grammar. SO obviously, the author is a thick-skulked baboon. Need further proof? Does he really expect me to laugh at someone hurting there balls or saying the word ‘piss’? Because, quite frankly, it’s not that funny all.
If he says ‘testicles’ one more freaking time I’m going to shoot someone!”I said testicle and now I’m a famous author!” NO!!! That’s not how it works!!!!
Hey, Gary Paulsen. Ever heard of the Grammar Slammer Bammer? Well, he’s coming for you
Haha, wow. So let me get this straight. You’re upset because the book isn’t called “Harris & I”? Listen, I don’t know where you grew up, but kids did not talk like that where I growed up. By the way, nice typo on “thick-skulked”. Did people call other people dum-dum where you growed up?
And no, I’d never heard of the Grammar Slammer Bammer. Who, I just learned (googled), is a character from a Canadian TV show. Apparently, on The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, the Grammar Slammer was a disembodied voice who would correct people’s grammar, and the Bammer was a big purple monster who would threaten people who didn’t talk good.
Which, actually, isn’t that far off from real life. People really pick on grammar. And it makes me crazy.
Let me put a hypothetical to you. Which of these people is more “advanced”:
Person A, who knows the “correct” way to speak, uses it, and corrects others.
-or-
Person B, who also knows the “correct” way to speak but tailors his/her speech to the situation, speaking with the style and lexicon of the person he/she communicates with, and never correcting grammar.
People, grammar exists only to make sure that the way we talk can be understood by others and for teachers to have something to mark off on papers rather than marking off the student’s understanding of concepts. Adhering to grammar is not the way to develop a person or a student.
Proof? Okay. I had a professor in college who was a total grammarian prick. If you messed up something grammatically, he would force you to finish exercises from his own shitty homemade textbook. So, when I came across something that I wasn’t 100% sure about, what would I do? I’d write my way around it. If I wasn’t sure about the right usage, I’d cut out the word completely. I wrote in exclusively simple sentences to avoid a comma splice. The results were grammatically-correct shit.
I hate people who pick on grammar.
Further, picking on a story because you don’t find the humor to be funny. Could this be because the book was written for school-age boys? I thought that shit was hilarious. Because I was a school-age boy. And because, well, I was tired of reading about people who were good examples and did everything right and made all the right choices.
Last night I was watching Army of Darkness. I know, this is all over the place, officially. But go with me for a second.
I was trying to figure out what appealed to me so much about the movie when I first saw it, maybe age 12 or so. And I think, although I couldn’t have said it at the time, it was that the main character was my favorite sort of character. A fuck-up who just charges in anyway.
The beauty of the fuck-up character who keeps moving forward is that you’ve got lots of opportunity for things to go awry, and you, as the viewer, KNOW that the character does nothing to help himself out. He makes things so much worse than they have to be. When you feel like a fuck-up and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, it’s nice to see other characters who fuck up, and it’s nice to see that maybe, just maybe, if you embrace your fuck-up status and push forward, you might end up in big trouble, but you’ll have some adventures, by god.”