Christmas 1936, my 8-year-old father was given a book of stories from the Old Testament. I don’t know how much he read it, the spine is still stiff. Growing up I’d seen this book around the house but never really looked at it. It wasn’t until I pulled it out of my “to blog about box” this afternoon and saw that it was not just a book of stories from the Old Testament, but a book of stories from the Old Testament written in words consisting of only one syllable. Or so the title claims.

Before I opened the book I wondered if the author shortened all the names in the book to make them one syllable. Noah = No? Moses = Mo? What about place names? Garden of Eden = Yard of Ed?

In reality, there are words with more than one syllable in the book, but the author hyphenated them or, in the case of names, used an apostrophe between the syllables which I think is cheating. (Actually, it was probably really hard to do this.)