Word: bedelia
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...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...
...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...
...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, she knows on her own exactly what to do?...
Abridged though it is, significant chunks of the play are lifted directly from the Bard himself, and it is in these lines of straight Shakespeare that the cast's comic engineering is most visible. Shakespeare is reinvented Amelia Bedelia-style with a suggestiveness that invites one to reconsider the comic potential inherent in even the most serious Shakespearean dialogues. Here all those idiosyncracies of Elizabethan English that we profess to understand in section are given a thorough airing. What does the guard mean with his "Stand and unfold yourself?" When did thumb-biting stop being synonymous with giving someone...
SWITCHED AT BIRTH (NBC, April 28-29, 9 p.m. EDT). Based on the true story of two infant girls accidentally exchanged in a Florida hospital and raised for a decade by the wrong parents, this four-hour mini-series stars Brian Kerwin, Ed Asner and the underappreciated Bonnie Bedelia...