Tag: words

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Oh, My Wordle

Dang it, Heather. You know my HABIT for wordplay far too well. In fact, you HONED in on it like a LASER. Now I can’t even ARISE in the morning without seeing five-letter groups everywhere.

And if that made way too much sense to you, someone’s probably hooked you on Wordle, too.

Yes, my wife got me into the latest word-puzzle craze, which is a little like giving a six-year-old a high-sugar cereal and no supervision. I’m a writer. An actor. A punster. I collect words like they’re going out of style, nerd out on their histories, and revel in the ones that have an extra-neat sound to them, regardless of their meaning. (Isn’t it fun to say “discombobulate?”)

So when Heather invited me in, I was wary. And then cautiously curious. And then hooked.

If you’re new to the latest social media fad, Wordle is a simple game with a simple object: figure out a hidden five-letter word in six guesses or less. Each time you get a letter right, its square glows, green for “yes, it goes here” or yellow for “right letter, wrong place.” Once you crack it, you can show off the pattern of your guesses to your friends, letting you compare how much of a struggle it was without giving away the answer to someone who hasn’t played yet.

It’s weirdly addictive …. “weird” mainly because there’s no way it can eat up your time. You get exactly one word per day.  So you struggle, solve and move on. That’s it. No temptations to play “just one more turn.” No real-time action to make you lose track of time. Heck, you can’t even buy anything to help you out, which I’m sure breaks the Ancient Code of Online Game Developers. (“Thou shalt make thy profit and keep it holy.”)

Sure, the fad will probably cool down eventually. They always do, whether it’s Rubik’s Cube or Angry Birds, reaching a stage where they still hold fans but not the spotlight. But while it lasts, it may just be the game our time needs, and not just because it’s a single-player game in an often-distanced age.

You see, the dirty secret is that Wordle isn’t really about words. It’s about pattern recognition. And these days, that’s a survival skill.

We’re surrounded by information. Claims about politics and society. Assertions about health and safety. Compelling thoughts that seem to fit so well with what we think and feel. Some are genuine. Some are trash. All of them make constant appeals for our time and attention.

It’s easy to just react, just like it’s easy to zone out on a game of Candy Crush or even Tetris (for the old-schoolers in the crowd). After all, time is precious and none of this could be that important, right? But inevitably, some of it will make a difference: for you, your neighbor, the world around you.

And so, at our best, we grapple. We study. We look closer and see what actually makes sense.

Mind you, it’s easy to force a pattern onto circumstances. Conspiracy theorists do it all the time. That’s a different thing entirely, like declaring a Wordle victory with four letters wrong because “I know what the answer really is!” You get so caught up in what an answer should be that you miss the clues to what it is.

So it’s good practice to have a game where you see patterns, but can’t impose them. Where the object is to be aware and find a path that makes sense. Where you can stay interested without growing obsessed.

Each of those is a skill worth building.

In fact, you might even say it’s a useful KNACK.

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I Now Pronounce Thee … How, Exactly?

Once upon a time, I learned the word “brazier.” Sort of.

As a kid, I could write the definition in a heartbeat, enough to know it was some kind of metal bowl or container that held fire. After all, I’d read it in fantasy novels. I’d seen it listed as a treasure in Dungeons & Dragons. My folks had driven by a Dairy Queen sign that shouted it to the world. Easy, right?

Only one problem: I’d never heard it out loud.

And so, one evening, college-age Scott read a passage out loud about a “burning bra-ZEER” … and Dad almost choked himself laughing.

“Scott,” he said, after surviving the mental image of flaming lingerie suddenly appearing in a medieval fantasy scene, “the word is BRAY-zhur.”

Oh.

Hooked On Phonics, you have a lot to answer for.

I bring this up only because Reuters and others recently reported on the hard-to-pronounce words of 2021. And as someone who blundered into the realm of burning braziers/brassieres, I have to show a certain amount of sympathy.

There’s the surname of tennis star Stefanos Tsitsipas, one of the rare names out there that’s less intuitive than “Rochat.” (For the newer readers here, it’s roe-SHAY.)

Or the challenge of wrestling with “Omicron,” the virus that not only endangered lives but tripped up tongues.

Some people stumbled over “Chipotle,” others over the last names of stars like Jason Kelce and Billie Eilish. Even a long runner like the city of Glasgow, Scotland caused a few folks to sweat while it was hosting last year’s climate conference.

If you’re comfortable with all those, well done. But there’s probably another stumble spot somewhere. Most people I know have a story of awkward linguistic discovery to share. My personal favorite is my wife Heather’s sudden childhood understanding that Nancy Drew had “titian” hair – TIH-shun, a particular shade of red hair – and not “titan” hair.

“It was the ‘80s!” she told me. “I just thought she had a really big hairdo!”
It’s easy to laugh, easier to blush. And maybe easiest of all to decide “You know, I’m just going to wait for someone else to try this.”

But if you’ve been brave enough to take the plunge – even if it left you with mud on your face – you’ve got my congratulations.

As a writer and an actor, I love the taste of words. And like any kitchen experiment, not everything’s going to work the first time. Some may even be real disasters. But when you get a new one down, you add a little more flavor to your world.

That’s exciting. And not just for words or recipes.

Even in an uncertain world, there’s a lot to discover. If you’re willing to take the step into something new, however small, that’s something to cheer. (As long as you’re not causing lasting harm, of course – would-be Dexters need not apply.) Each new achievement gives a little more understanding: of a topic, of yourself, of those around you.

Sure, it may also give you some laughter at your own expense. But if it’s a laugh that invites people in and reminds us that we’re all human … well, we can use more of that, too.

So have fun. Experiment well. Read aloud. Maybe even get some burgers and ice cream afterward.

After all, I know a Dairy Queen with a great brazier.  

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Happy Humblebrag?

I love collecting words. And a long time ago (though not in a galaxy far, far away), I came across a prize specimen: humblebrag.

You probably know the term. I’m sure you’ve met the reality. It’s the boast disguised as modesty, or the “aw, shucks” that checks itself in the mirror. An old pastor of mine used to call it the competition of “I’m the most humble man in the room.” It never really rings true, yet people keep trying it, whether it’s to look good to others or feel better about themselves.

So why the language lesson? Because it’s that time of year again.

Too often, we let Thanksgiving become a humblebrag holiday.

At its essence, it’s a great idea … a holiday that whispers where others shout. Instead of filling the skies with fireworks or the airwaves with music (aside from 18 minutes of “Alice’s Restaurant”), we’re encouraged to turn inward, reflect and appreciate.

It sounds good. Heck, it is good.

But there’s a danger in counting blessings. It’s easy to stop taking stock and start taking inventory.

“I’m so thankful that I have them … and those … and that … ooh, and the other stuff … and especially that …” All too soon, it becomes a celebration of abundance, where the important thing is to have. After all, a long list means you’re a really appreciative person, right? It’s the sign of someone who knows how to celebrate the good things!

But what happens in a year when the good things are hard to see?

There’s a lot of stress and strain hemming everyone in right now. It might be tight times. Or a family that’s divided, or scattered, or has someone missing that should have been present. It might even be too many days with too much darkness, in a world where stories of pandemic, injustice and hate seem to shout everything else down.

When you’re in the middle of that storm, Thanksgiving can sound kind of hollow. Thankful? For what? Where?

 It’s an old story. One as old as the holiday itself.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears reminding: the first national Thanksgiving was born in war. In 1863, the country remained torn by a civil war that was far from over. Far from a time of peace and prosperity, it was a time when even national survival remained in doubt.

So when President Lincoln declared the holiday, humblebragging was notably absent. Read today, his proclamation seems to hold a note of astonishment. Despite everything, he noted, the nation was still carrying on: still growing, building, trading, interacting with the world. In the midst of pain, and with much yet to do, there still was much to be grateful for.

That’s the real heart of the holiday. Not a feast of abundance, but hope amidst hardship. Even when it’s a hard light to kindle.

Maybe especially then.

There’s no need to throw out the turkey and the stuffing if you’re fortunate enough to have them. But if this is a hurting time, then don’t forget that this is your holiday too. You don’t need to have a mile-long self-satisfied list, or be a model for Norman Rockwell. If you’re here, somehow, against all the odds … then that may just be enough.

Hold on. Hold hope. And when better times return, remember the ones that were less comfortable. Both as a source of gratitude and as a reminder to reach for those still struggling. To be thankful and a cause of thankfulness in others.

I hope you find some of that thankfulness this season. I know I’ll try.

You have my word.

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In Translation

The difference between the right word and almost the right word, Mark Twain once told the world, is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. By the look of things, Heather had just swallowed a horde of lightning bugs.

“En route??”

Heather shook her head as she looked away from her reading material, torn between hilarity and disgust. “There has got to be a better way of saying ‘on the move’ than that. I mean, it’s just … just wrong!”

A little background may be in order here. Heather, like millions of people across the internet, decided to jump feet first into Duolingo. She wanted a fresh start that would keep her brain busy, so rather than resume her long-ago college pursuit of German ( from which she mostly retains “The window is dirty”), she instead went after French.

Funny thing. When you’re home a lot due to chronic illness, you wind up with a lot of time to spend on language lessons. A few months ago, she felt confident enough in her reading comprehension to try children’s books. So she found some old favorites in translation, the ones that she knew as well as her childhood phone number.

That’s a great way to navigate an unfamiliar road. But it also means that the potholes can be really jarring. And one such dip in the road came when The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe portentously declared that Aslan was “en route.”

“Really? REALLY?”

In the original English, the phrase is “Aslan is on the move.” Heather loves the feel of that phrase – the sense of something coming, of life waking up, of expectation and possibility and change. You could even see it as the opening of a chess game, the unfolding of a strategy that is just now beginning to show itself.

By contrast, to hear that Aslan is “en route” sounds like a package is coming from Federal Express. Definite. Predictable. Decidedly non-mystical. “Yo, I’m on my way, see you in about 15!”

Maybe that sounds a little finicky. But words matter. Even when they technically mean the same thing, they carry a different weight. As the writer Terry Pratchett knew, there is a hilarious difference between calling your epic tale “Gone With The Wind” and “Blown Away.”

The dictionary wouldn’t care. But we know better. What we say isn’t necessarily what someone else hears.

That matters to all of us. Not just the translators.

It means peeling back assumptions and old habits, and fitting yourself into someone else’s experience.

It means hearing stories that might not be comfortable, going places you haven’t been, learning how life and the world works for someone who isn’t you.

It means examining your mental picture like an engineer scrutinizing a design, trying to see what’s been left out – or maybe, should never have been put in.

It’s not easy. And we’re not going to get it right all the time.

But making the effort means a wider, more caring, more interesting world. It means living with chords rather than monotones, a library instead of a worn-out book, a rich and varied playlist instead of a track perpetually caught on a single earworm.

It means we actually hear each other. And help each other. That we become harder to fool with fears and hatreds because we’ve caught a glimpse of the wonder that may wait behind.

That’s worth it. Every time.

Listen well. New worlds await, and not just Narnia or Hogwarts. Maybe they’re still far off, but have no fear.

They’ll soon be en route.

Right, honey?

 

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Windows in the Wall

It began with a deep family discussion. My wife Heather and her sister Jaimee had become embroiled in one of those topics that can transform an entire autumn: should Jaimee dress as Princess Leia for Halloween, or as a unicorn?

The arguments were weighed and considered with the seriousness of a House investigating committee. (I kid, of course –  it was actually much more serious than that.) In the midst of it, without warning, our disabled ward Missy looked up.

“Unicorn,” she said.

A pause followed.

“Well,” Jaimee said, “if Missy says so, I suppose that settles it!”

I’m not saying Missy is an Old Testament prophet, whose judgments come replete with ominous clouds, rolling thunder, and a lightning show worthy of Castle Dracula. (Well, not until she gets really impatient with us, anyway.) But if you’ve followed Missy in this space at all, you know that she tends to the quiet side. Some people say a word to the wise is sufficient; for Missy, a few words to a conversation is abundance.

But in the time that Heather and I have cared for her – seven and a half years now – there are periodic bursts of new vocabulary, like a river carving new channels. Every so often, the results are striking enough to mention here, like when “ma shoe” became “ma tennis shoe” a few years ago, or last Christmas, when she improbably added “Hallelujah” to the list. Even calling me “Scott” sometimes instead of “Frank” (her dad’s name) or “He” counted as a major milestone.

The thing is … lately, there have been a lot of milestones.

“I wanna go” is a standard phrase. But “Let’s move over here” is new.

“Lookit!” is an old favorite. But “Look at the animals,” said while pointing to a herd of horses, caught us off guard.

“Can you do me up?” popped out one afternoon, as she extended a jacket in one hand.

And even the stock comments sometimes turn into short conversations now.

“Where are we goin’?” Missy asked for the 10th time near the end of a drive one day. Rather than answer again, I lobbed it back to her.

“I don’t know, Missy, where do you think we’re going?”

“Home!!”

She was absolutely right.

We’ve always known that Missy understands more than she’s able to say, that a lot hides behind her silence. One night, as I read A Wrinkle in Time to her, the character Mrs. Whatsit was describing the art of “tessering” – folding time and space – by noting how much more easily a caterpillar could cross the edge of a picnic blanket if the corners were pinched close together.

Heather peeked her head in. “How far have you gotten?”

“We’re learning how to tesser,” I responded.

And Missy, quietly, picked up the edge of her blanket and brought the corners together. And grinned.

Lesson learned.

And now, by fits and starts, the words are starting to catch up. Not in a mass wave – the limitations she has are still real ones, an internal wall rarely scaled. But she’s increasingly finding cracks in the wall. And every once in a while, she builds windows.

I don’t claim to know how. Yes, we read to her a lot, we talk with her a lot. Maybe it’s as simple as that – that what you give your attention to flourishes, like seeds receiving water.

But that discounts Missy’s own work. The learning and growth that’s going on inside her, the process that only she can see.

Maybe that sort of growth always seems kind of magical, regardless of your age or condition. We’ve all done it. The lucky ones never stop. And most of us are still powerless to explain it fully.

I’d love to hear what Missy thinks. Maybe someday I will, just a little. After all, she’s already folded time and discovered unicorns. What’s one more miracle?

Let’s move over here, and see.

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Putting In a Good Word

The text from home caught me by surprise. It seems we’d gotten a special gift, and not via UPS or the U.S. Postal Service.

Missy had added a new word to her vocabulary.

“We’re watching Christmas videos,” my wife Heather wrote me, “and the Hallelujah Chorus was on and she sang ‘Hallelujah’ clearly.”

I blinked. And blinked again. And smiled.

For those who are new to this column, Missy is our disabled ward. She’s my age, but can seem much younger, especially since she’s a lady of few words, some of which do double duty. “Book” can refer to our reading time, or to an inquiry about where her purse is. “I wan’ a pop” can mean that she wants a soda from the fridge, or that she thinks it’d be cool to have a fast food night.

Sometimes, when her emotions are high, the words get more numerous and clearer. (The most infamous was when she told her father, after a near-accident on the road, “Damn it, Frank, are you trying to ****ing kill me?”) And in the six and a half years since Heather and I moved in, we’ve noticed how much she really understands and seen some additions to the vocabulary.

But going from the usual words and phrases to “Hallelujah” … well, even for someone who loves Christmas as much as Missy does, that’s a big leap.

I’ll admit, when something like that happens, there’s a temptation to doubt the miracle. The little voice in your head starts whispering “It was a coincidence. You want to hear it. You’re just making assumptions.”

Except … that same night, Missy and I went out on our near-daily Christmas light run. And as we observed the golden trees, and the sparkling roofs, and the Santas dressed in hula skirts, a really sickly-sweet cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” came on the radio.

And as the chorus came up, Missy echoed “Hallelujah.” It was slightly swallowed in the middle, but unmistakable.

Did you know your jaw can get sore from dropping it too many times in one day?

In an odd way, this underlined what I love best about the holiday season – how a seemingly ordinary moment can suddenly become extraordinary.

Snow transforms a landscape you’ve seen a thousand times into something new and amazing.

Lights and decorations turn a row of ordinary homes into something that shatters the winter night and brings smiles or laughter.

And so many stories from so many faiths celebrate the same kind of transformation, whether it’s a seemingly ordinary flask of oil stretching to eight days of devotion, or a seemingly ordinary family that suddenly becomes the start of a message to the world.

Like presents under a tree, the ordinary holds surprises – and we’re usually not the ones who decide when to open them. The paper can fall away and the ribbons loosen at any moment, introducing something we never expected. Sometimes it’s just a moment’s reaction. Sometimes it’s life-changing.

I think we notice it a little more at this time of year. We pay better attention. So much is both new and long-familiar that we can slip out of our usual habits of thinking and see things that we might otherwise miss.

Sure, it’s easy to get too busy, or stressed, or maybe even overwhelmed with memories that hurt more than they cheer. But the moments are still there, whenever we’re ready to meet them. Sometimes even when we’re not ready.

Joy can ambush us from strange corners. It only takes one unexpected moment, and the day is suddenly new, and different, and wonderful.

And to that, I say hallelujah.

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Showing Our Metal

Today’s not-so-random Rochat thought: I think bronze medalists may have the best of all possible worlds.

Yes, I know we’re nowhere near an Olympics. Stay with me, OK?

Consider. You’re recognized as one of the best in the world. You get your place on the stage. You’re less likely to worry about having just missed the top spot, like a silver medalist might, nor does your life get turned completely upside down the way a gold medalist’s does. (You also don’t get the same endorsement deals, but we’ll go there another day.) It’s accomplishment mixed with celebrity mixed with a certain amount of anonymity.

No, it’s not a bad deal at all.

And this year, maybe it’s just a little appropriate.

On Tuesday, Heather and I celebrate 19 years of marriage. The People With Names For Everything like to call this the bronze anniversary, which amuses me a bit. I mean, these are the same people who decreed that 10-year anniversaries are tin and that 17-year anniversaries get celebrated with furniture, which makes me wonder if the PWNFE needed their basements cleaned out and saw an opportunity.

But even for this crew, bronze is a curious choice.

Is this the anniversary to bask on a Florida beach and turn inviting shades of brown? (Or in my case, not-so-inviting shades of brilliant scarlet.)

Is this the time to join the late, great, Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze, on some hair-raising pulp adventure?

Is it an occasion to join an Ancient Greek re-creationist unit and load ourselves down with well-burnished swords, spears and breastplates?

OK, I know, the boring and mundane answer is that it’s an excuse to contribute to the American economy by purchasing a category of gift with a high material density that will live in the basement or garage forever … except when it mysteriously emerges at night to bruise a careless toe. I get it. (And the accompanying Band-Aids.)

But in all serious – maybe the PWNFE got it right this time.

Maybe, for a long-lived marriage, bronze is exactly the right choice.

I’m going to precede this by warning that I Am Not A Metallurgist, nor do I play one on TV. But I’m just enough of an amateur historian to know that bronze gets kind of an unfair rap when it’s compared to the iron weapons and armor that replaced it.

There’s a myth that iron replaced bronze because it was a clearly superior metal. Not really. While iron has its uses (especially in later eras that would make true steel), ancient bronze was a strong, useful material.

What it wasn’t was a highly available material. The alloy required materials that could be difficult or expensive to get, particularly tin, while iron was widely available. So iron was often cheaper, and soon was ubiquitous.

So. You have something surprisingly strong and beautiful, with a mix of components that aren’t easy to acquire – something that everyone wanted, but that was hard to possess.

If that’s not the definition of a good marriage, than what is?

After 19 years, I think we’ve had one of the great ones. Granted, we haven’t had tried wallpapering a room together yet (the ultimate test) but surviving chronic illness, newspaper schedules, and eight-hour drives with an anxious dog may be a decent substitute. Through it all, we still make a heck of a loving team, one that’s grown even stronger and more exciting since we started taking care of Missy six years ago.

So bring it on. The Games are underway and we’re ready to take the field again.

It’s time to go for the bronze.

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O-Pun My Word

Saturday morning had come, and with it, Missy’s favorite routine: get in the car and go downtown for a visit to the bookstore and a bite to eat. Neither of us could wait.

Standing on the driveway, I unlocked the Honda, opened the door, and then told Missy the words that I’d said a hundred times.

“Ok, Missy, jump on in.”

She looked at me. Smiled her big 100-watt grin. And then very deliberately jumped in place.

I burst out laughing, in surprise as much as humor. She grinned along with me. With one carefully chosen move, Missy had joined the ranks of the Rochat family punsters.

At first glance, that might not sound like much of a shocker. Those of you who know me well know that I am an incorrigible punster – as in “Please don’t incorrige him.” I lived and breathed wordplay around the dinner table as a kid, then inflicted it on my fellow human being over years of headline writing for newspapers. My personal favorite was summing up a demolition derby as “Wreck Creation,” although a street fair that I described as “Planes, Trains, And Audible Squeals” wasn’t far behind.

So to live with me is to live with puns. Simple. Natural. Perhaps a bit painful, like living with an amateur orthodontist who likes to practice at home. (Brace yourself.) But certainly not surprising, right?

Well … not until it comes to Missy.

For those who haven’t met her in this column yet, Missy is my wife Heather’s physically and mentally disabled aunt. We act as her guardians, alternately caring for her and being amazed by the world she reveals. It can be a quiet world at times, since Missy says maybe a few hundred words per week – and at that, she’s gotten more talkative than she used to be.

We’ve suspected – heck, we’ve known – that Missy understands more than she can say. Give her directions like “Could you go to the bathroom, put some water in the yellow cup, and bring it back here?” and she does fine, when she’s not feeling sassy or contrary. Read her a book at night and she’ll sometimes comment on the plot, either verbally or physically. (If an injury is described, for instance, she’s been known to touch the afflicted body part and go “Ow!”)

Like a computer with a dim monitor and no printer, her output is a lot more limited than her input. Enough so that Heather and I often keep track of new words and sentences used, as proof that she’s adding to her capacity.

But punning, even visual punning, is a whole new leap.

Puns are often called “the lowest form of humor.” Like many paronomasiacs (pun addicts), I’ve taken that to mean that the pun is the foundation of all humor. It requires someone to hold two meanings in the brain at once and instantly understand both, to take the normal clarity of language and tie it in knots for entertainment.

It’s small wonder that the sign of approval for a pun is a wince. After all, it knocks out the keystone of language itself, that you can hear the same thing I say without misunderstanding. It’s language as taffy, soft and pliable.

Now Missy had added a bend of her own. And with that simple bend, our window into her mind not only opened up a little wider, it revealed a room we hadn’t even suspected was there.

That is encouraging beyond belief.

So thank you, Missy. Welcome to my hobby and a wider world. I knew you were capable of a lot, but this one went beyond anywhere my thoughts had flown to.

That’s right. The pun was mightier than the soared.

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Just My Type

I opened the covers of The Empire Strikes Back Storybook and blinked, stunned. Sure it had been a long time. But how had I forgotten this?

I hurried upstairs to Heather, the thin hardcover volume in my hand.

“Look, hon,” I said, half-sarcastic, half-awed. “Words.”

“Really?” she responded in the same tone.

I held the 35-year-old book open, careful of the ancient masking tape over the binding. There, among the plentiful, full-color photographs of starships and dueling Jedi, was column after column of gray type. Not thin columns, either – roughly 52 pages of words packed like a legion of Imperial stormtroopers, a children’s book that demanded reading, insisted on it.

My wife and I looked at it for a moment in wonder, than at each other. The same thought was on both our minds.

They’d never let this get printed today.

The book had arrived in a stack from Mom, the latest round of liberating the basement from our long-ago possessions. The fact that even my picture books had been so reading-heavy didn’t completely surprise me – I’ve been an avid reader since the age of two and a half, and could even remember using the tattered Star Wars book to act out scenes with my action figures.

But I’d forgotten how much of an honest-to-goodness book it was. As opposed to a picture book with barely-disguised captions.

I don’t mean to sound jaded or old-fashioned here. But I really do wonder if the same book would survive in the hands of modern editors and publishers, when “Show, don’t tell” has all but become a mantra. And not just in children’s publishing.

For a while, one of Heather’s prize possessions was a 1985 issue of Cosmopolitan, just for sheer contrast. Fewer pictures, lengthy articles that might have to “jump” twice within the issue before being completed. Compare it to a modern issue with its splashed photos and large-font one liners and it’s like holding Robinson Crusoe next to Go, Dog, Go!

You could make the same comparison with newspapers, where the emphasis has long been on more photos and graphics, shorter stories. Or in half a dozen other genres and formats, especially when you add digital and online publishing into the mix. Folks want pictures, video, interactive graphics, cute kittens!

Now there’s some truth to that. The author Spider Robinson once noted that reading is a newcomer as a means of acquiring information and one that requires a lot of work compared to just … looking. And with the decline in children who read for fun (31 percent of kids aged 6 to 17, compared to 37 percent in 2010), it might seem like we’ve got to pull out all the stops to hook kids back in to the habit.

But I wonder.

What if the problem isn’t the format, but the content?

Remember Harry Potter? The boy wizard dragged a whole generation of kids (and their parents and older siblings) through seven increasingly thick volumes of adventures. It became a point of pride to have read each book on its publication day.

There have been other crazes since, if not as intense. (What could be?) In the United Kingdom, in fact, series like The Hunger Games and Twilight (yes, I went there) are credited with bringing up the number of child readers.

Give kids a story they’re interested in, it seems, and they’ll chew up text just fine. Adults, too, I’d bet. If you’re interested in the subject, a longer story is a blessing, not a curse.

By all means, have cool pictures and all the other bells and whistles. Heaven knows my storybooks had art that popped. But remember the fundamentals. When you want people to drive, you sell cars. When you want people to read, you sell words.

Good words. And plenty of ‘em.

We can do our part, “selling” by example – it’s almost proverbial that when parents read, kids read, too. And over time, if enough of us reward good words with a good audience, someone’s going to see the chance of making good money.

Someday, just maybe, our prints will come.

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A Word Out of Place

Who can forget the climax of “Gone With the Wind” when Rhett turned to Scarlett and shockingly, unforgettably told her “My dear, I don’t give a darn?”

Or the pages of Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War” where William T. Sherman warns that “War is heck?”

And of course, there’s that shocking background refrain in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” where one of the “Chronics” in the asylum can’t say anything but “Fff ….” Come to think of it, I guess he never gets to say much of anything.

At least, that may be the case with a new app called Clean Reader that’s advertised to remove all the profanity from an e-book. The app can be set to Clean, Cleaner, Squeaky Clean or Off, depending on how many swear words a reader feels like tolerating; censored words receive a blue dot and a suggested substitute for those that tap the deletion.

It’s not the first time that something like this has been tried, of course. Go back to the 19th century and you find Thomas Bowdler’s cleaned-up edition of Shakespeare, where Opehlia drowns accidentally and Lady Macbeth screams “Out, crimson spot!” (And yes, this is where the word bowdlerization comes from.) Film buffs can point instead at CleanFlicks, a company which re-edited movies to remove offensive content until a judge told them to stop.

The difference here, of course, is that there’s a certain amount of reader control. Instead of buying an adulterated copy, the customer buys the same book as everyone else and then chooses whether to filter it. That’s led some to defend the app: “It’s my book and my business, right?”

There’s some truth to that. But there’s also a catch. Two catches, really.

Yes, you can do with your book whatever you want. If you choose to right now, you can take any book you own and go through it with a black marker to remove anything. That’s not new, either. Thomas Jefferson once took that approach to his copy of the Gospels, literally trimming out any reference to miracles or the supernatural.

But that’s where you run into Catch No. 1: markers don’t work so well on the mind. Even when you let something line out the profanity for you, the word isn’t gone. Every time a reader hits the deleted or substituted word, the act simply calls attention to what used to be there, unless the reader is either innocent or quite young.

And then there’s Catch No. 2, brought up by a friend: if you don’t trust an author to use the right words, why are you reading him or her in the first place?

One of the glories – and yes, sometimes, one of the dangers – of the written word is that it’s a telepathic act. By staring at words on a page, you can know what a writer was thinking, no matter how much time has passed since the thought. At any time, a reader can dive into the ideas of Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger or Maya Angelou, touching them mind-to-mind until the book is closed.

But the words matter. Twain once said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. They’re tools, chosen to evoke a desired effect.

Change the word, and you change the effect. You no longer have a clear window into the author’s mind, but only an approximation.

It’s true, not every author uses profanity, just like not every painter uses teal or violet. The ones that do have a reason. If the excuse seems weak, that’s a perfectly valid reason to read a different book or even a different author. Nobody reads everything, nobody has to read anything.

But what you do choose to read – don’t hold back. Read it. Without screens. Without modification. Find your way into that mind, even the uncomfortable parts, and see what you discover.

You may love it. You may hate it. But you’ll know because you’ve read the book, instead of almost the book.

And missing that opportunity would be a darned shame.