X-Rated

If you're here, and can make sense of what I'm writing, then you've gone through the ordeal of learning to read. If you have kids or work with kids, then you've had a chance to revisit the process, as I have recently. Commonly found in the arsenal of reading primers are picture books with 26 pages of apples, bats, and cats, etc. My recent re-acquaintance with these books has stirred up a fire in my belly.

I imagine that many children have eaten apples, touched a baseball bat, and petted a cat by the time they enter kindergarten. But I suspect that the number of 4 year old radiologists in the world is rather small. Zero, I daresay. So when you hit page 24 of your picture book only to read the word "X-ray", I think it would be quite understandable if the word failed to resonate with the child. I mean, it's a crap example anyways. Why not just replace the rest of the words with things like F-bomb and Big-O and make all of the examples into useless self-references.



And what are the alternatives? Xylophone, it seems -- no doubt placed there by the percussionist lobby, because the only reason anyone has ever heard of that instrument is from those damn books. And until Black-Eyed Peas replaces Fergie with a xylophone virtuoso like Ian Finkel, that's unlikely to change.

As a letter, it's not like it does anything other letters can't do. In words like xylophone it's pronounced like a Z, and in words like exit, it could just as easily be replaced with ks. Really, the only thing X has going for it is its shape, which is kind of cool and mysterious -- taboo, even. The letter most similar in shape, the 'K', doesn't have quite the same mojo, and in any case, I don't think the porn industry would have done nearly as well with triple-K (i.e., KKK) movies. So I'm going to look to the growing Tea Party movement to see if I can get my idea out there and in the hearts and minds of voters intent on trimming Big Government and Big Alphabet, and hopefully getting the economy turned around.