Q: Online, The New York Times posted this headline: “I Paid My Kid $100 to Read a Book. You Should, Too.” It could be read as saying I should join the mother in bribing her daughter, though the intended meaning is to do something parallel. Up your alley?
A: In our opinion, there’s no ambiguity in that Times headline. “You Should, Too” is simply an elliptical version of “You Should [Pay Your Kid $100 to Read a Book], Too.”
We doubt that any Times readers would think the writer was urging them to bribe her child. Like you, they would realize “You Should, Too” was short for the clunky full version above. It’s similar to someone saying, “I brush my teeth with Ipana. You should too.”
Elliptical constructions have been common in English since Anglo-Saxon days. Here’s an example from King Alfred’s late ninth-century translation of Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Pastoral Care), a sixth-century Latin treatise by Pope Gregory:
“We magon monnum bemiðan urne geðonc & urne willan, ac we ne magon Gode” (“We can hide our thoughts and desires from men, but we cannot [hide them] from God”).
And these constructions can often be read two ways, with the intended one clear in context. For instance, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth fails to persuade Mr. Bennet to curb Lydia, “and she left him disappointed and sorry” (short for “and [when] she left him [she was] disappointed and sorry”).
As for that Times article, we were struck by something else—the writer’s insistence that her 14-year-old child read only a print book, the kind stacked in “teetering towers” on nightstands. We wonder if she’d have needed a bribe to persuade the girl to read an ebook.
Although print books are still dominant in the US, ebooks are growing in popularity and 30 percent of Americans read them, according to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center.
We used to feel about print books much as the writer of the Times article. We have a library of several thousand that we’ve read and reread over the years.
However, the small type in many of the books has become a challenge to our aging eyes. Cataract surgery and new reading glasses have helped, but not enough. With ebooks, we can select the most comfortable type size, typeface, background, margins, line spacing, and so on.
And one unexpected delight of ebooks is the ability to click on an unknown word, place, poem, song, or person’s name to learn more. In reading print books, we often skip over such things rather than run to a dictionary or a computer, leaving blanks in our understanding and enjoyment.
We’d argue that an ebook, with its ability to fill in those blanks, may often provide a deeper, more satisfying experience than what the Times writer refers to as “classic deep reading—with two eyes in front of paper, and nothing else going on.”
The truth is that books have had many forms over the centuries, and “book” hasn’t always meant one printed on paper and held between covers.
In Old English, spoken from around 450 to 1150, a “book” (boc or bec) could refer to a literary work in portable form written on vellum, parchment, papyrus, wood, metal, or other material, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
In fact, it wasn’t until the late Middle English of the 15th century that the first printed book appeared in English—Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473-74), William Caxton’s translation of a French romance written by Raoul Lefèvre in 1464. (A “recueil” is a literary compilation or collection.)
Today when we want to reread a print book in our home library, we’re more likely to borrow a copy from one of the online digital libraries affiliated with our local public libraries: Cloud Library, Hoopla, and Libby.
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