The Daily Sauce :: A Daily Sip of Hip

November 19th, 2007 edition of The Daily Sauce: Entertainment. Visit Our Entertainment Archive.

A Little Language Lesson

For some of us, the best thing about graduating from high school was saying bye-bye to Spanish verb conjugation and late nights spent with flashcards.

But in Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, the first book by St. Louis native Elizabeth Little, we discover that learning a new language can actually be ... fun! Who knew? Little's enthusiasm for traveling the world by way of language-learning is catching, and each chapter is stuffed to the gills with fascinating info about languages from around the world, including those ancient, arduous and actually made-up.

Laughable lists and sidebars throughout teach us all sorts of wordy trivia: Discover which language Huttese (the one used by Jabba the Hutt) was based on, and why in 1963 John F. Kennedy mistakenly told those in West Berlin that "I am a jelly donut." We also learn that translation can be tricky: "Bite the wax tadpole," for example, is what Chinese merchants ended up with when trying to find a way to write Coca-Cola in their own language.

Little has two stops scheduled in our area, including tomorrow night's event at Left Bank Books. So pick up a copy to have signed and prepare for a Little language lesson, peppered with lots of laughs.

Who: Elizabeth Little
When: Tue., Nov. 20 � 7 p.m. and Mon., Nov. 26 � 7 p.m.
Where: Nov. 20: Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid Ave., St. Louis; Nov. 26: Subterranean Books, 6275 Delmar Blvd., University City
Cost: Free
Info: 314.367.6731 or www.left-bank.com; 314.862.6100 or www.subbooks.com; for more about Elizabeth Little, visit her blog at www.unhappymedium.com

Orange Tree illustration by Ayumi Piland

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