Liesl schillinger biography for kids
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My grandmother was a great lover of birds and looking around my house you might think I was bird obsessive myself.
But the picture I was going to have Elizabeth draw, which is those skeletons of baby birds whose mothers had fed them bottle caps, just made me cry every time I looked at it. Just like, “Woe is me, everything is unfair.” I coined a word “wildschmertz.” Which is the pain you feel when you hear about horrible things happening to animals and nature.
When you’re studying languages—and I did Latin and Greek in high school—you can’t help noticing with a little thrill the things that pop up and link the languages; the roots, for example. I want people to get it. So I thought, we just can’t do it.
WORDBIRDS: AN IRREVERANT LEXICON FOR THE 21ST CENTURY IS OUT NOW.
FOR MORE ON LIESL SCHILLINGER, VISIT HER TUMBLR. How did you divvy them up into the twelve sections in the book?
SCHILLINGER: My goal was to really do what Campbell’s Soup does, which is, they don’t put their soups in the store alphabetically, so you always keep on looking and then you suddenly realize “Oh! In life, she avoided media spotlight and kept her secrets.
There was also something called Sniglets on HBO that recalled it.
BOLLEN: I remember that from when I was a kid. One of the things is, I’m forever getting so frustrated because I’ll go to answer the phone and I’ll realize that I’m answering the television remote. This month, Schillinger has compiled more than 200 of her best inventions in Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster).
They just never stopped talking. The example is, when I was a girl, I read a lot of Dickens. I do that. Boil… Shower… I actually thought of a word and I wrote it down on my computer on a post-it. Maybe I wanted to try lobster bisque, which I didn’t think I did.” So this way it’s not boring A to Z.
It’s A to Z within twelve chapters. But if you’re saying that’s a valid word, then maybe I’ll do it.
BOLLEN: There are tons of words to play with. I did a big profile of him in Newsday and he went on to write a book called TheF Word, which is every good citation he could find for how different F words have been used—there are just thousands of them.
Ande did a book called Word a Day. He writes about language and worked for decades as the head of the American OED, I believe.