Junie B. Backlash

There’s trouble brewing at the local library over Junie B. Jones, the main character in a series of book that enjoys immense popularity among the pre-pre teen crowd. What drives some parents into a unnatural state of apoplexy is the grammar employed by Mrs. Jones. In the stories she garbles up adverbs and objects in a creative and quirky way. As related to the New York Times:

“My dad doesn’t like the grammar,” said the Bartells’s youngest, Mollie, 9. “And I guess that’s important, because maybe when you grow up and you’re at work and you say, ‘I runned,’ people will get annoyed at you.”
She added: “I’m also not allowed to watch R-rated movies, but nobody is these days.”

One might argue that lackadaisical grammar is a problem that goes right to the halls power in America. Many citizens have known the feeling of watching the president speak on television, and then quietly reconstituting the meaning of a sentence that was deployed from the podium without tense agreement, or with vocabulary choices that confound meaning.

With a household bursting with daughters we know the Junie B. oeuvre very well. The missus and I both studied English at university, and we’re kind of, well, literature nerds, and we both thought the books were simple and cute – and better than most fare available to grade-schoolers. Any parent with serious concerns about their child’s understanding of correct grammar could easily remind little Suzy, after the giggles subside, that it’s “more beautiful” and not “beautifuller”, thereby transforming a whimsical story into a teachable, if tedious, moment.

But you know what happens?

The little child in question learns. He or she stops saying all of those cute things. It becomes spaghetti instead of “piz-ghetti”, a train instead of a “twain”, and instead of “those guys-es”, they. That small human grows up immediately, losing before your eyes all of those creative and endearing characteristics which would almost certainly have fallen away with time anyway, and advancing the day when they become a miniature adult, stressed about work, writing things in a planner, and jabbering on a cell phone.

Childhood is very short these days. I think Junie B. should enjoy a prominent spot in the grade-school library, and her grammar choices should be greeted with benign tolerance … even if some people get annoyed at you.