[LM_NET] GEN: Please don't call me a BOOKWORM.

["Hastings, Jeff" <HASTINGJ@HOWELLSCHOOLS.COM>]

I always enjoy chatting with Joseph R***, the student just voted
"Biggest Bookworm" in our school's eigth-grade mock elections.
Naturally, I see him quite often.
 
Being such an enthusiastic reader, he's also sensitive to nuances of
language and we wound up joking about how we both have always hated the
term "bookworm." We both agreed that it'd be hard to think of another
supposedly positive label that had such slimy, larval, parasitic and
generally pejorative associations. The way we see it, if a human being
wants to compliment another human being by associating them with a
different species in the animal kingdom, he should at least choose from
among vertebrates. There are plenty of them, after all.
 
Joe has a good sense of humor about being named after an imaginary,
bespectacled nematode,* though. When I asked him if he could think of a
non-creepy label that might be more suitable for recognizing an avid
reader, he just grinned and said "I kind of like the title coolest guy
in the world."
 
Jeffrey Hastings
School librarian,
Highlander Way Middle School,
Howell, Michigan
 
hastingj AT howellschools DOT COM
 
*Actually, you can't classify bookworms. Natural science knows no such
thing as a bookworm, 'cause it does not exist.  Instead the name is a
generalization for any creepy-crawly that might munch on a book now and
then, such as silverfish or the larvae of the furniture beetle. Yummy.
 


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