Baby Grammarian

Jesse Walker | January 24, 2007

Below, Nick Gillespie writes:

Yet the [Baby Einstein] stuff is good product, a real cut above a lot of the other, even more tedious crap that's out there for kids.

I hate to disagree with my esteemed editor, but I have to object to this "cut above" business. I swore when my daughter was born that we wouldn't buy anything labeled "Baby Einstein," "Junior Genius," "Newborn Vulcan," etc., and I've kept to that promise; my only exposure to Baby Einstein's series of Warholian videos for toddlers has come at other parents' homes. But we did receive one or two Baby Einstein books as presents. Here's a quote from Who Lives in the Pond, written by the presidentially approved Julie Aigner-Clark herself:

Tadpole scoots through the water. He spies a spotted salamander slide along the mossy green bank.

"Slide"..."sliding"...what's the diff? It's all the same to us Einsteins, right?