Word: bedelia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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?...