Learn to Read - Read to Learn with Dr Seuss
Three Lesser Known Dr Seuss Facts...
- Green Eggs and Ham was written on a $50 bet. Theodor Geisel's publisher, Bennett Cerf, bet him $50 that he couldn't write an entire book using 50 or fewer unique words. Geisel won the bet using exactly 50 words: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, not, on, or, rain, sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, us, would, with, you, like.
- The Cat in the Hat was created to destroy "Dick and Jane" primers. In 1954, Life magazine published a report criticizing American children's reading primers for being painfully dull. A publishing director gave Geisel a list of 348 words every six-year-old should know and challenged him to write a story kids couldn't put down using only those vocabulary words. He used 236 of them to craft the book.
- He invented the word "nerd". The term first appeared in print in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, where the narrator claims he will collect "a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too" for his imaginary menagerie. The character was illustrated as a small, unsmiling humanoid in a yellow jacket, and within a few years, slang culture adopted the word to mean a socially awkward person.
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