The Phantom Tollbooth

by Norton Juster

“IT’S LAUDABLE TO BE AUDIBLE”

can’t see how anybody who claims to love language can fail to marvel at the beautiful slipperiness of meaning that puns, like aquarium nets, momentarily catch and bring shimmering to the surface.

act to shatter or at least compromise meaning; a pun condenses unrelated, even opposing, meanings, like a collapsing dwarf star, into a singularity. Maybe it’s this antisemantic vandalism that leads so many people to shun and revile them.

operate to generate new meanings, outside and beyond themselves. Anyone who jumps to conclusions, as to the Island of Conclusions, is liable to find himself isolated, alone, unable to reconnect easily with the former texture and personages of his life. Without the punning island first charted by Norton Juster, we might not understand the full importance of maintaining a cautionary distance from the act of jumping to conclusions, as Mr. Juster implicitly recommends.

Children’s books are incendiary stuff; they are liberating, they mold young minds, they teach children to think independently, to question, to investigate, just as Milo learns to do during his travels. In a country where at least a thousand writers paid for their words with their lives and many more with their freedom, how essential it was for writers to choose words cleverly, yet without compromise.

linguistic acrobatics

“Never underestimate the intelligence of children. And never rob them of a sense of wonder.”