are making grand headway. Another one, if you will.
Why do s-s-s-s-people who can talk right waste so s-s-s-s-many words saying s-s-s-s-nothing?
Mr. Spiro smiled again. I was proud of my question because I thought it was one that he could really haul off and take a poke at.
Perchance do you know the name Voltaire?
I hadn’t heard of the name but it started with the same sound as my name and so I didn’t care much for it. I shook my head.
Voltaire was a French philosopher of two centuries past. He answered your question quite well.
La parole a eté donnée a l’homme pour déguiser sa pensée
.
Mr. Spiro moved his mouth the same as always but what came out was strange and exciting like if you turned on the kitchen faucet to get a drink of water and sweet lemonade came out instead.
Mr. Spiro smiled another new kind of smile.
Tis rude of me to go out of country but it’s a favorite quote of mine that rings more true in the original French. It translates: Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
I burned that sentence on to my brain like Ted Williams’s name was burned on to my Louisville Slugger baseball bat.
I was the one smiling now. Whoever this Voltaire guy was he threw a hard one right down the middle when he said that. I guess people were using words to keep you from knowing what they were thinking when Mr. Voltaire lived in France and they were sure doing it big time in Memphis in 1959.
So many questions started whirling around in my head that I didn’t know which one to pick. The question that came out didn’t make any sense and I couldn’t finish it because I didn’t know what I was trying to ask.
Who s-s-s-s-thought up the letters and sounds that s-s-s-s …?
My Gentle Air faded into thin air. Mr. Spiro looked at me until he knew my brain had completely stopped working.
If I understand your question, I believe you have Napoleon Bonaparte to blame.
s-s-s-s-The short s-s-s-s-guy?
A good laugh from Mr. Spiro.
While the short guy, as you refer to him, didn’t invent the modern alphabet, he did help us preserve it.
I waited without saying anything because Mr. Spiro wasn’t blinking and I knew he was getting ready to tell a good story.
Almost two hundred years ago our diminutive Napoleon was out and about doing his conquering in Egypt when one of his lieutenants brought him a large stone with writing on it. His army had found it near a town named Rosetta. They deduced the stone to be centuries old. When the British defeated Napoleon they took the Rosetta Stone to London. Archaeologists studied the writing and decided that our modern alphabet and the corresponding sounds actually came from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Mr. Spiro could put so much information into his sentences that it hurt my head trying to keep up.
Hieroglyphics is tantamount to writing with pictures.
I remembered seeing the word
hieroglyphics
in
My Weekly Reader
but I had never heard it said out loud.
s-s-s-s-But words and letters can’t be s-s-s-s-pictures.
He came back with questions that sent my mind off to the races.
Does
W
remind you of waves of water? Does a capital
H
remind you of the columns of a house? Does an
O
resemble the face of an owl? Does an S look like a snake?
I juggled the letters and waves and owls and snakes around in my head. How come nobody had ever told me that letters were more than sounds you made?
Mr. Spiro got to his feet. He took his glasses from the tip of his nose and slid them on top of his head.
Memory serves that I owe you the second installment of the incentive compensation I promised last week.
He reached inside the door and handed me another piece of a dollar bill. It was the lower left-hand corner. On it was written the word
servant
in the same careful hand that
student
had been written in the week before.
You now have one half of your golden fleece.
With Egyptian hieroglyphs and
My Weekly Reader
pictures of Cleopatra and snakes crawling around in my head I knew I was going
Why do s-s-s-s-people who can talk right waste so s-s-s-s-many words saying s-s-s-s-nothing?
Mr. Spiro smiled again. I was proud of my question because I thought it was one that he could really haul off and take a poke at.
Perchance do you know the name Voltaire?
I hadn’t heard of the name but it started with the same sound as my name and so I didn’t care much for it. I shook my head.
Voltaire was a French philosopher of two centuries past. He answered your question quite well.
La parole a eté donnée a l’homme pour déguiser sa pensée
.
Mr. Spiro moved his mouth the same as always but what came out was strange and exciting like if you turned on the kitchen faucet to get a drink of water and sweet lemonade came out instead.
Mr. Spiro smiled another new kind of smile.
Tis rude of me to go out of country but it’s a favorite quote of mine that rings more true in the original French. It translates: Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
I burned that sentence on to my brain like Ted Williams’s name was burned on to my Louisville Slugger baseball bat.
I was the one smiling now. Whoever this Voltaire guy was he threw a hard one right down the middle when he said that. I guess people were using words to keep you from knowing what they were thinking when Mr. Voltaire lived in France and they were sure doing it big time in Memphis in 1959.
So many questions started whirling around in my head that I didn’t know which one to pick. The question that came out didn’t make any sense and I couldn’t finish it because I didn’t know what I was trying to ask.
Who s-s-s-s-thought up the letters and sounds that s-s-s-s …?
My Gentle Air faded into thin air. Mr. Spiro looked at me until he knew my brain had completely stopped working.
If I understand your question, I believe you have Napoleon Bonaparte to blame.
s-s-s-s-The short s-s-s-s-guy?
A good laugh from Mr. Spiro.
While the short guy, as you refer to him, didn’t invent the modern alphabet, he did help us preserve it.
I waited without saying anything because Mr. Spiro wasn’t blinking and I knew he was getting ready to tell a good story.
Almost two hundred years ago our diminutive Napoleon was out and about doing his conquering in Egypt when one of his lieutenants brought him a large stone with writing on it. His army had found it near a town named Rosetta. They deduced the stone to be centuries old. When the British defeated Napoleon they took the Rosetta Stone to London. Archaeologists studied the writing and decided that our modern alphabet and the corresponding sounds actually came from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Mr. Spiro could put so much information into his sentences that it hurt my head trying to keep up.
Hieroglyphics is tantamount to writing with pictures.
I remembered seeing the word
hieroglyphics
in
My Weekly Reader
but I had never heard it said out loud.
s-s-s-s-But words and letters can’t be s-s-s-s-pictures.
He came back with questions that sent my mind off to the races.
Does
W
remind you of waves of water? Does a capital
H
remind you of the columns of a house? Does an
O
resemble the face of an owl? Does an S look like a snake?
I juggled the letters and waves and owls and snakes around in my head. How come nobody had ever told me that letters were more than sounds you made?
Mr. Spiro got to his feet. He took his glasses from the tip of his nose and slid them on top of his head.
Memory serves that I owe you the second installment of the incentive compensation I promised last week.
He reached inside the door and handed me another piece of a dollar bill. It was the lower left-hand corner. On it was written the word
servant
in the same careful hand that
student
had been written in the week before.
You now have one half of your golden fleece.
With Egyptian hieroglyphs and
My Weekly Reader
pictures of Cleopatra and snakes crawling around in my head I knew I was going
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