When Alligator Gets Loose in the Dictionary!

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive?

And what if that dictionary also had feelings?

And that dictionary felt sad because, unlike all the other books on the shelf, she didn’t have a story to tell.

She just had lots of words that were arranged in alphabetical order.

Well, that’s the idea behind a new children’s book called The Dictionary Story.

It’s by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston.

And this is a book that’s lavishly illustrated, and the story is a little bit hard to explain, but I’ll try.

One day, a hungry alligator gets loose from the A section of the dictionary, and he goes chasing after a donut over in the Ds.

And the donut rolls away, and the chase continues through the dictionary, and the alligator and the donut run into a ghost and a puddle and a few other things.

And then over in the tea section, everything goes topsy-turvy when they run into a tornado.

So how does all this get back in order?

Well, that’s what the alphabet’s for.

So this is an imaginative book.

And if you’re an adult and you’re looking at it long enough, you’ll find a lot of other surprises for you as well.

So that book is The Dictionary Story by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston.

We’ll link to that book from our website, and a little later in the program we’ll talk about some more books we’ve been reading.

If you’ve got a book that you love that you’d like to recommend to us, 877-929-9673, or tell us about it in email, words@waywordradio.org.