Word: amelia
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...couple won a measure of vindication this spring when Governor Bill Ritter signed a bill making Colorado the 10th state to allow gay and lesbian partners to adopt children as couples instead of restricting parental rights to one partner. Now Seeley can legally adopt Allen's biological daughter Amelia, 2, and Allen can adopt Seeley's adopted son Foster, 1, and this ability to become more like other families delights the couple. "Being able to give our children that kind of legal, two-parent security," says Seeley, 36, a medevac nurse, "means more than being able to marry...
...bittersweet consolation of outgrowing your favorite children’s books is the chance to revisit them as adults with keener eyes. One of my own pet series of grade-school readers featured Amelia Bedelia, a bonneted and primly smocked English maid with a shaky grasp of her own native language. Much to the chagrin of her employers, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Amelia comically (and sometimes catastrophically) misinterprets their housekeeping instructions, thanks to her literalist approach to language...
...drawing the curtains” didn’t involve a pencil and a sketchbook? Or that dressing the turkey—unlike dressing the dog—didn’t call for a sweater and a pair of argyle socks? Read in college, on the other hand, Amelia Bedelia looks less like an amusing language lesson than a perfect modern parable for the restrictive role that language plays in socioeconomic class mobility, particularly among immigrant populations...
...Eliza Doolittle is the stuff of fiction. Similarly, the Christ-like patience exhibited by Mr. and Mrs. Rogers in the face of Amelia Bedelia’s repeated blunders is pure fictive fantasy: No real-life employer would stand to have their house “dusted” with extra helpings of powder over every available surface. Amelia Bedelia keeps her job by virtue of a valuable non-verbal skill: world-champion baking prowess, which she shrewdly parlays into Mr. and Mrs. Rogers’s favorite dessert, lemon meringue pie. When she’s in trouble...
...Amelia Bedelia’s charming conceit—the ridiculous assumption that a born-and-bred Englishwoman would fail to understand common expressions in her own tongue—is a hard, ironic truth for immigrants in the real world. Central Americans who leave their home countries to find work in South America are confronted with vast linguistic differences between their respective regional versions of Spanish and those practiced in South America. This communication challenge, as I had the chance to observe firsthand last semester in Argentina, doesn’t do them any favors while they attempt...