This post first appeared in the Fall 2024 SCBWI Highlighter
I’ll bet you’ve never called anyone an idiom. Or maybe a doppelganger? A bandersnatch? A solipsist? How about a pixilated peduncular pandowdy? If you have, chances are you were a kid becoming acquainted with big words that sounded hilarious when used for the first time. There was no need for real accuracy, just the feel of them in your mouth made you laugh uproariously when you called your cohort an idiom.
The kids I’ve known never shied away from the challenge of big words, they embraced it. Big and unusual words are the icing on the cake of literacy, a reward for sticking it out and finding that reading can be fun and entertaining; that there’s more to books than lessons and facts. Suddenly, at the ripe old age of eight, they’re impressing their teachers, their parents, and their parents’ friends with words like, borborygmus or tintinnabulate. Where do they find words like these in children’s books? Good question: Someone has to write them. And many authors do sprinkle their stories with unusual words, usually defining them on the spot, and sometimes including a glossary.
Such words take children way beyond the onomatopoeia of ZAP! POW! SOCK! A kid could now ask his parents if they are not being too pragmatic about cleanliness; tell them that he’d never prevaricate about snacking, and that he’d only eaten a quantum of cookies before lunch. This has a stunning effect on the listener, sucking the air from their lungs and expunging their own prosaic retort, leaving them to perpend not just the words, but the wunderkind that stands before them.
Vocabulary empowers one with confidence as the user suddenly has the weapon of words in his quiver to lay low any bully or insult, or deflect any cockamamie idea that comes down the pike. We tell children to use their words, rather than punches, and then often shield them from the most powerful. A well-placed idiom like “cease and desist” is much more than “Stop it!” It’s, “Stop, never do it again, and remove yourself from this place, or I will bring all authority to bear and you will rue the day!”
Now when the teacher lays her hairy eyeball on this intrepid kid, he can say, “Really, I wasn’t plagiarizing, I simply appropriated the sections of her story that were not of her lived experience, but of mine.”
Suddenly they have agency to speak on their own behalf, because there is nothing a kid with a thesaurus cannot do. Even the very misuse of words, that will happen from time to time, draws the attention of adults who will dig deep to recall the definition, and who may be forced to overlook the error, lacking the confidence to correct the cheeky little sophism. Anyway, it’s better to misspeak at eight than twenty-eight. Armed with a treasure trove of words and a non-stop memory, your young sesquipedalian is captain of his own debate team, master of his IQ!
So those were my thoughts when I hatched MR. BANDERSNATCH, a story about minding your p’s and q’s, and loaded with words beginning with q’s and p’s, and naturally, back-loaded with a glossary of unusual words and idioms. It was wrought some time ago—just for fun, because I’ve known so many kids who enjoyed unusual sounding words. And they’re not always the nerds. Every child is trying desperately to engage with and decode the language he’s been given. Teach a kid one new word and he’ll ingest it: give him a vocabulary and stand back--Formidable!
This short (really short) story was sitting on my shredder because, it seems I was very short-sighted, and had no idea what to do with it. One reason, as I mentioned, it’s short: 2,737 words, including said glossary. And secondly, I worried something so weird and quirky would be off-putting, and might say a little too much about the author. But I was tired of running across the thing, so one morning, in a spasm of decluttering, I gave due process short shrift, delivered a hasty verdict, and laid MR. BANDERSNATCH with other doomed detritus atop the Fellows®, whom I can always count on for a swift execution, skillfully grinding evidence, guilt, and any further moral obligation into dust.
But wait! A short story contest seemed a better death for this perplexing piece of work; this manifestation of momentary derangement. I could humiliate myself and MR. BANDERSNATCH, and allow a third party to kill him off in a coup de grâce, sending him quietly into the Sea of Syncope and possibly a burning pyre. And then I could grind him up with a clear conscience. With nothing to lose, I packed him up with a few more p’s and q’s, loaded him into the template, and hit Send. Then, like a forlorn parent shipping her eldest off to camp, I mooned around the house for days reminiscing about all the reasons I had created him in the first place.
By and by, Next Generation Short Story Awards announced the winners for 2024, and I was stupefied to learn MR. BANDERSNATCH had won the category for General Fiction. Mr. Bandersnatch? I never imagined any of the judges getting past the first sentence of a middle-grade story that begins with difficult words only later defined in a glossary. I had grossly miscalculated the perspicacity of the esteemed judges who sit on these panels, wading tirelessly through hundreds, if not thousands of stories, and hardest of all, agreeing on a winner. I owe them an apology. And so I do apologize. Beg pardon, in fact. Most sincerely and unaffectedly. Additionally, out of an abundance of gratitude, I add my full-throated appreciation and warmest THANK YOU!!!
Alrighty, then, I said to myself. It seems he has been granted a reprieve, and I escorted MR. BANDERSNATCH away from the gallows (that’s right—back off, fellah!). Mr. B. is now lovingly 3-hole punched, sandwiched between Davey board, and sits upon a climate controlled shelf with other remarkable characters enjoying his new lease on life. We can all look for him in NG’s Anthology of Winners coming in July, filled with all the wining stories, and also the names and titles of the short-listed contestants, who are probably, like me, scratching their heads over the unlikely and now oddly outstanding, Mr. Bandersnatch.
* Note: This post also appears on Liza's Goodreads Account
