I will give you a short history lesson to begin.
In 2002-2003, Beverly and I were teaching English as members of a group of twelve Canadians at Guangxi University in Nanning, China. For the two of us, one of our routines became bedtime reading to one another from a small collection of books of anecdotes starting with Bachelor Brothers Bed & Breakfast by Bill Richardson. I don't know why either, but it was fun. Except it didn't last - the "to each other" bit I mean. She decided that I was a better reader and she would rather listen, and that was the end of it - not the reading, just her participation as reader.
It is now 23 years later and we have covered a lot of text. We have revisited the novels of W.O. Mitchell and Margaret Laurence. We have gone through articles by Arthur Black and Stuart McLean. We have consumed poems and essays and short stories. And it has always been with me as the reader and B as the read-ee, No that's doesn't sound right; I've never been able to get a clear "read" on her. As a matter of fact, one of her ongoing bits of hilarity-invoking questions is the rhetorical, "D'ja know what I'm thinking?" Breaks me up every time. Even when I'm reading.
She is the listener, mostly silent, except when I think she's dozed off and try to conclude things. Not a chance! There's no end to the sessions in sight and each session always ends the same way - with a plea for "just one more" and my switching off the lamp. This is not foreplay we're talking about here; it's late.
And wouldn't you know it, someone has discovered and written for the NY Times to ask rhetorically, "Is there a person on earth who doesn’t love to be read to?" Well I had to read that article for myself and there I discovered the Harvard Sentences and a link to my own Fridge-Magnet Grammar. Harvard first.
There are 72 of these Harvard Sentences lists with ten sentences in each list and they came from research in the boiler room under Harvard’s Memorial Hall during World War II where volunteers endured hours of noise as scientists tested military communications systems. They became a tool for speech researchers in many fields giving rise to improvements in the development of hearing aids, amplifiers, microphones, speech-to-text apps, noise shields and many more in the field of acoustics. Here's some of the sentences:
It’s easy to tell the depth of a well.
The hogs were fed chopped corn and garbage.
Help the woman get back to her feet.
The harder he tried the less he got done.
It caught its hind paw in a rusty trap.
Write a fond note to the friend you cherish.
Most of the news is easy for us to hear.
These sentences were chosen for their “phonetic balance,” the way their frequency of sounds are similar to spoken language, and as such "they’re tools, not advice or koans" as the NY Times Jan 11/2025 article, "Language arts" by Melissa Kirsch makes clear. (click the link to read) But, she adds, "it’s impossible to listen to even the least emotive person recite: 'The stray cat gave birth to kittens' and not detect some poetry". Even nonsense sentences compel us to make sense of them because that's what we are and do. We're meaning-making creatures. Now here's my contribution.
I had done a course in linguistics - transformational-generative grammar I think it was and you can forget the word right now. I didn't use it, most of us couldn't spell it, it was a guaranteed conversation stopper, it never got me a date. But, it was a brilliant description of the way languages (all of them, including Klingon) work. It said that every language consisted of a bunch of sounds and a set of rules for combining those sounds. That's really all you need to know; the rest is history - or at least my classroom history.
I was almost as bored with the language textbooks my grade nines were using as they were and after lunch one day I got an idea. Usually I don't put a lot of faith in after-lunch ideas, fraught as they are with coffee highs and carbo lows, but there I was in the staff room and someone had left some coloured paper lying there and this notion came to me.
I got a pair of scissors and some more colours of paper and a felt pen and started making strips and printing words on them. I put nouns on one colour (blue, I think it was) and verbs on another and adjectives, adverbs, etc. I actually got a bunch done before the next class. Oh, and I went through the office and grabbed some of those brown envelopes your report card used to come in to use as containers. I wasn't sure how it would all work out, but I was going for it.
In class, I put the contents of the different envelopes across the front desks and without any explanation (mostly because I didn't know what to say as an introduction) asked students row by row to come up and take one piece of paper from each pile. Then on the chalkboard - we still used chalk in those long-ago days - I set down a formula. It went something (no, exactly) like this:
Green + Pink + Blue + White + Yellow + Orange Strip
Then, everyone got to read the words they had set out. This is a sample of what they said:
Six hairy desks were yodel(ling) in the photograph.
The little hamburger will scratch between the covers.
Which sexy galoshes was(were) drink(ing) before the band arrived.
And it went like that through about 32 examples, that being the number of students in the room. And when asked, everyone got a picture of an event – itchy hamburgers, alcoholic galoshes, etc. Then they had a chance to get together and swap pieces to see if they could make a sentence that made sense. Chaos. I shoulda' seen it coming, but class time was almost over and the doors were closed. What's the connection with being read to?
Everyone loves being read to. I had that class of grade nine kids, which are generally considered to be the sweathogs of the high school set, and they were rapt through the entire 32 readings. I dulled their enthusiasm a bit by telling them that the envelopes of paper strips were lexicons (although one or two wanted to know how the Irish got into a grammar lesson) and that they got pictures of things being read to them because that was what humans do - make meaning of sounds. Whether the sounds are spoken in a basement lab at Harvard or in a high school classroom in Saanich, they still compel meaning.
In later years I expanded the lesson slowly so that after a week or so I had "lexicons" (brown envelopes to you) that were labelled determiners and modals and auxiliary verbs and clauses of all sorts and phrases and tense and all the boring stuff some linguistics teacher would love. I have used that grammar lesson in various forms with classes from grade six to twelve and even at that university in Nanning. You probably don't care any longer and so let's talk about being read to.
That journalist, Melissa Kirsch knew not only that everyone loves being read to but that you can't be read even nonsense sentences "and not detect some poetry". Now Beverly, even in her late-night semi-comatose state, can detect sense from nonsense in my readings, but nonsense really is a poetic form. Lewis Carroll knew it and wrote for his niece, Alice:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
You can really see those "mome raths" can't you. And all manner of writers have created their own fantastic imagery to entertain us as well as young nieces. You should try it some time. Borrow some young people (relatives work best so as not to invoke legal consequences) and read to them. Then read to them backwards, or make up your own nonsense sentences. Young minds are quite plastic so you won't hurt anything. These are some famous writers of nonsense verse if you must defer to others:
Edward Lear with his Owl & Pussycat who went off to sea.
Carroll (again) and the Walrus and the Carpenter on a predatory oyster feast.
Mother Goose certainly - and you wonder why those verses are timeless.
Dr. Seuss more recently and you pick any of his works.
And you can google (if you can't recall) those famous nonsense poems of your youth. I always liked and quoted (to eye-rolls as kids got older) Ogden Nash and his explication of germs. Herewith:
The Germ
A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race.
His childish pride he often pleases
By giving people strange diseases.
Do you, my poppet, feel infirm?
You probably contain a germ.
Oh, and if you absolutely must know more about that linguistics lesson of mine, there is a book which I've written but haven't had the courage to inflict on the world just yet. It sits on my "Books" page as a "coming soon" item called Fridge-Magnet Grammar. Encourage me.