Well, yeah, they’re different from you, right?
That’s an odd thing to say. I’m not sure why you are personalizing that statement inaccurately.
Well, about the 11 fingered guy, the narrator reacts the same way I and any other little boy would; “I wish I had eleven, too!”. But my wife, who is very sensitive to body-shaming issues, did skip over the fat fish when she read it to our kid.
I don’t remember anything about the book at all, but I remember when I was about 6, foreshadowing my destiny to be an annoying contrarian hipster, I strongly held the opinion that On Beyond Zebra was Seuss’ best book.
Is the fat fish shamed for it, or is it just a fat fish? I don’t have the book handy.
‘Fat’ can be a value neutral term, or even a positive one. Note ‘The Secret Garden’, in which every time the protagonist is described or describes herself as ‘getting fatter’ this is clearly a good thing. (The book has other problems; but fat shaming isn’t one of them.)
It was used neutrally. I am not prepared to defend my wife’s choice in this particular matter.
I can just picture you as a six year old lording it over the four year olds “Man, I was into Seuss before he want mainstream. It’s all marketing and hype now, man…”
‘What are you, a baby?’
(Words guaranteed to enrage any 4yo.)
The page first said something like “This fish is thin…”
Then it said, “This fish is fat. The fat one has a yellow hat.”
Here is a pic.
fwiw, I read that book as a child and didn’t think any less of the fat fish for being fat. I read it as a neutral description.
And today I am a fat woman who is generally pretty happy with her body, unless something is aching.
Yes, that looks rather like my dim memory: ‘fat fish, thin fish’ presented as no different that ‘red fish, blue fish’. Seuss is just teaching the words, and what they look like in print; there isn’t any connotation of its being better to be a fat fish than a thin fish or the other way around.
There’s nothing wrong with the word in that sort of context.
Nothing wrong? Yes and no. Personally I would avoid books that may cause my child to loudly proclaim in a grocery store “Look at that fat man!” while pointing to someone unusually overweight. The “loud proclamations when seeing something unusual” are hard to avoid with most children. The term “fat” for someone large is more easily avoided (though not easy), starting by not including them in repeated reading of children’s books using the adjective.
If you don’t find them something to read in which it’s not a negative, though, they’re likely in the current society to encounter it only as a negative.
– I don’t know whether there’s a racism-expurgated version of Secret Garden around.
Doesn’t that make it more of an issue?
I’m not sure that ignoring the word “fat” makes it less of an issue. It’s in standard neutral use in English in a number of contexts; it’s not as if it works to say ‘we never use that word!’
And even then, “fat” as a descriptor for overweight depends on a specific species basis. When it comes to real fish, to say that a tuna is fatter than a minnow isn’t really the best adjective, it’s not some sort of value judgement that the tuna is too big.
The only exotic dancer I’ve ever met lived in Boston (at the time) and was Asian. Does that cancel out?
We always wondered about the disjointed nature of “The far distant Oxus”, the really excellent 1937 children’s novel written by Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock when they were still in school. Ahhhhhh. It’s disjointed in the version we admired because the racist joining content has been expurgated.
Anyway: objecting to role models, content and characterization in Seuss is one thing. Objecting to specific individual caricatures in Seuss is a particularly American form of racism, indicative of the way you view everything through the prism of race.
Unless something has changed recently, the QOP has been allowed to promote the narrative that says SJW liberal snowflakes had something to do with the cancellations, when it was just a business decision.
To be fair, recent discussions of Dr. Seuss among so-called “SJW liberal snowflakes” doubtless had something to do with making that business decision in the first place. As I mentioned in a concurrent thread:
My personal guess is that by publicly announcing that they are going to cease publishing the “Problematic Six” Dr. Seuss titles, Dr. Seuss Enterprises was seeking to re-entrench the rest of the Seuss booklist as approved wholesome classic children’s lit with no discomfort about having to explain weird racial caricatures to the kiddies.
And as it turned out, of course, the announcement and the subsequent “cancel culture” publicity foofaraw resulted in a massive spike in Seuss book sales, as consumers rushed to buy more copies under the mistaken impression that they were “sticking it to the libs” and/or acquiring a future rarity for investment purposes.
I don’t know if the publicity team at Dr. Seuss Enterprises actually foresaw all that, but I bet they’re still nursing the champagne hangovers!
Right wing freakouts are so predictable, and so toothless, that at least some companies have got to have started deliberately courting them. I half suspect this was the case with Disney when they “fired” Gina Carano - certainly, I’ve been seeing the word “Mandalorian” in headlines an awful lot for a show that’s not currently airing new episodes.