Racial epithet makes news

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 4:44 PM -0400 7/7/10, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> >At 7/7/2010 03:37 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >
> >>Surely someone has criticized even the changed version. Doesn't it mean that
> >>Chinese people only and always eat with "sticks"?  And by mentioning it ("To
> >>*think* that I saw it on *Mulberry* Street!") isn't the
> >>narrator telling children that it's weird?
> >>
> >
> >No.  Rather, that Lower Manhattan could be weird.  (And perhaps it
> >was weird to see a Chinese man in a neighborhood of Italian
> >immigrants.)
>
> He was surely just ahead of his time, given the current ethnic
> composition of the neighborhood.

Except young Teddy Geisel was most likely inspired by the Mulberry St.
in his native Springfield, Mass. (Springfield also has a Bliss St.,
though it doesn't intersect Mulberry as it does in the book.)

Oh, and Marco is supposedly based on Marco McClintock, son of his
editor, Marshall "Mike" McClintock.


--Ben Zimmer

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