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<\/figure>\n<\/div>Review of The Pig in the Spigot<\/em> by Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2000).\u00a0 Originally published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 19<\/em>(1): 1.<\/p><\/div><\/p><\/div>\n Here\u2019s a book to help us think about words. The Pig in the Spigot informs the reader that a pig in the spigot is no big problem; a little extra water will \ufb02ush him out.<\/p>\n An ox in the phlox is more worrisome. The elf in the belfry has a problem; a belfry is too gloomy for an elf. And the rat on Ararat has no problems at all; he should go make friends with the lady rat. In short verses, the poet Richard Wilbur invites the reader to \ufb01nd friendly little words inside big words, and then to imagine why they\u2019re there.<\/p>\n The trick is addictive. Friendships have ends, your mother is other, there\u2019s occasionally a bat in the bathroom, stewards sometimes serve stew, and gophers frequently go, but there\u2019s no sin in sincere, thunder is over, not under, and balloons don\u2019t have to be balls. The Pig in the Spigot sets up games to keep on playing, for parents and kids or kids alone \u2013 a useful bene\ufb01t for a book, when the games are good games.<\/p>\n These games are very good — for banishing the natural fear that culture arouses in beginners. Mysterious words are scary to everybody. When adults run into \u201celeemosynary\u201d or \u201cunprepossessing\u201d or \u201creticulated,\u201d they feel they have been found out, shown up as not smart enough. That happens more often than not to children. The culture keeps hammering at them: \u201cThere is so much you don\u2019t know.\u201d This book suggests instead: \u201cMake a friend within the scary word, and then work together with that friend to \ufb01gure out the place where it lives.\u201d That\u2019s good strategy for coming to terms with new words. Indeed, it\u2019s pretty good strategy for coming to understand any complex thing: \ufb01nd some part you know about, and work outward from there.<\/p>\n These games also show up the hidden power of words. The feeling one has, coming off the book, is that words carry stories inside them. Words are not just passive tools. Words, on the view Wilbur evokes in this book, have all sorts of interesting relations with other words. One just has to listen to them, let the words tell their stories. That\u2019s an attitude that is at least as accurate as the \u201cwords are shovels and hammers\u201d attitude, and much more helpful for a beginning writer, or for a reader hungry for meaning.<\/p>\n When someone plays the game that The Pig in the Spigot starts, he or she will eventually come to make distinctions between fanciful presences of words in words and the deep ways that words are compound and complex and bearers of strange construction histories. This investigation is deep in the roots of philosophy; the many ways that words contain meaning in their internal relations is the theme of the \ufb01rst effort at linguistic understanding in Western philosophy, Plato\u2019s Cratylus, a work as playful in its own way as this one, though largely inaccessible to those who don\u2019t know Greek.<\/p>\n Someone might object: \u201cYes, words are serious business, and should be taken seriously. A child should learn about roots and pre\ufb01xes and suf\ufb01xes properly, in order, without all this misleading fanciful talk. There is no scienti\ufb01c way that \u2018ant\u2019 is a part of \u2018pantry.\u2019 Any educated adult knows that.\u201d There are a couple of answers to that objection. First, kids who are forced to learn lists of pre\ufb01xes and suf\ufb01xes and Greek and Latin roots generally end up hating word work, despising dictionaries. They are given many answers before they have had the chance to ask any questions, and the possibility of word-geology as fun is stolen from them. I\u2019d guess that, once children get started Wilbur\u2019s way, \ufb01nding words in words and wondering what they are doing there, they\u2019ll take on information about pre\ufb01xes and suf\ufb01xes and roots as a way to make the game more fun, and they\u2019ll develop a life-long habit of squinting at words to see what might be in them.<\/p>\n Also, as with many things that adults allegedly learned and now know, it turns out that mostly they didn\u2019t and don\u2019t. People usually have as little sense of how words work as of how computers work. The person who sets out to discover something seldom wonders what is covering it up: that might be a good question to start with. If I inform you of something, I seldom think about making a form in you (a sort of brain surgery). But I should think about that. When I want to understand something, a plausible strategy is to stand under it. And responsibility, that grand thing parents are always trying to drum into their kids, insists on being about response, not neatness and obedience. The old ways of teaching don\u2019t make poetic adults.<\/p>\n We can learn from our words, if we listen to them and play with them and see what they contain. That\u2019s a lesson from the outer limits of philosophy, from Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Ricoeur. But the journey of listening to our own words can\u2019t begin with these venerable giants. It has to start with \ufb01ne springboard books like The Pig in the Spigot<\/em> and with good games, played for life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Peter Shea Here\u2019s a book to help us think about words. The Pig in the Spigot informs the reader that a pig in the spigot is no big problem; a little extra water will \ufb02ush him out. An ox in the phlox is more worrisome. The elf in the belfry has a problem; a belfry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":177,"parent":0,"menu_order":64,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-591","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":715,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/591\/revisions\/715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/iapc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}