Among the trends and media that to some extent shaped me as a 90s kid—Beanie Babies, Tamagotchis, Pokémon, and so on—the book Frindle stands out as a particularly strange and perhaps underrated work in terms of its influence. For the uninitiated, it’s a story about a fifth-grade troublemaker with a strict teacher who discovers that words are made up by people and sets out to turn the pen into…yep, the frindle.
I’m not sure exactly when I encountered this book—it was published in 1996, so in theory I could have read it as early as the first grade. That feels a bit young though, because the age of the protagonist suggests its reading level is a good measure higher than that of a 6-year-old. I definitely associate it with elementary school, which for me ran from kindergarten to fifth grade, so let’s just plop me right in the middle and say I read it in third grade because I was advanced but not a genius. You know, an approachable 8-year-old intellectual.
Reflecting on Frindle more or less 25 years after I first read it is fun because while I haven’t actually gone through it again, it randomly occurred to me that I’ve been thinking a lot about its core message lately. The protagonist, Nicholas Allen, invents a new word for a pen, and Mrs. Granger punishes this silliness the more and more it catches on in their school. This of course makes it more popular, then it becomes a national sensation, and eventually it ends up in the dictionary. I find the story not only a clever way to express creativity in kids, but low key…a Zen approach to life? Words are made up! They’re concepts. Metaphors. A thing is not actually the name you assign to it, or even a thing. It’s just what it is prior to any labels that could be placed on it—the kind of idea I got pretty high-minded about and potentially even lost in a few weeks back.
This is a pretty cool and (I imagine, due to its popularity over the years) mind-expanding notion to teach to kids. At first it’s crazy—the dictionary, Lord of Words, is written by people? And subject to evolution? If enough people use a word and commonly understand it to represent something, it goes in there? WHAT. All of a sudden it makes total sense. Let’s frindle it up in here!
As an adult in my 30s, I think a lot about different thresholds, and how so many of them aren’t replicable, clear lines even if we try to make them so. Childhood to adulthood. Amateur to professional. Subjective idea to objective fact. Ink-filled writing utensil to pen. Or frindle. It’s funny to consider that a story about a kid stubbornly projecting gibberish onto a simple tool might have influenced that view of the world from a young age. Then again, I grew up during Pixar’s unprecedented run of original excellence in animated “children’s” movies. Toys that taught me to accept change. Monsters that taught me how love conquers fear (and how capitalism can yield corruption?). Fish that taught me the importance of trust and how differences don’t define you. There was a lot of heady stuff underpinning the colorful and silly worlds in which I immersed myself. I guess the best content for kids always has that.
In any case, add Frindle to the list of books I would like to read to children of my own if I have them one day. It might be a big gap from that to Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a very Zen-sounding book on my own adult reading list, but I’d wager the seed it plants could similarly grow in the direction of that sort of curiosity over time.