On Beyond Sense

When news came out recently that Theodor Seuss Geisel's publishing company would stop printing new editions of six books that it said had potentially harmful illustrations in them, a furor arose.

A number of folks on my Facebook newsfeed linked to or quoted extensively from opinion pieces that said this was in no way nohow anything like "cancel culture." One said, "This was his own publishing house deciding to no longer print some of the titles," conveniently leaving aside that the author has been dead for more than 30 years and it is highly unlikely that anyone currently at "his own publishing house" had much of a connection with him or could be said to acting according to what his wishes would be were he alive and properly indoctrinated into woke culture today.

These same voices offered no opinion on whether or not the online retailer Ebay's announced decision to remove all copies of those same books from its listings was evidence of the "mythical 'cancel culture'" which I have read exists only in the fevered conspiracy theorist minds of conservative thinkers. My suggestion for those wishing to make some money with their copies of the offending books is to title them Mein Kampf or Protocols of the Elders of Zion or some other book that Ebay still finds acceptable but somehow secretly encode in the product description that one is actually selling McElligot's Pool.

No, not really. That would be fraud, and wrong. No one should do that.

In any event, leave it to linguist and cultural commenter John McWhorter to get at the meat of the problem with one of the illegal books, On Beyond Zebra. Seuss's exploration of the sounds that could be described with the letters of the alphabet that might come after the letter "Z" is right up McWhorter's alley and actually happens to be my favorite Seuss book as well. McWhorter highlights how specious the supposed offense is and how worthwhile the book is for children exploring the world of the alphabet and how many more sounds can be made from its letters than just a plain old 26.

Which, coincidentally, happens to be the IQ rating of the people who came up with this idea.