Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars by Walter R. Brooks

Author:Walter R. Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Overlook Press

Freddy turned to see Leo in the doorway. “How is you!” he exclaimed. “What kind of baby-talk is that?”

“I . have . to . talk . like . that,” said the lion. He spaced his words as if he was choosing them with great care, as if he didn’t know the English language very well. “Mist—that is—the chief said last night I talked too much. I said how can I stop? I have to talk when I have things to say. He said: ‘I know how. When you talk, leave out one let—one piece of the alphabet.’ I said: ‘O.K., I’ll leave out x. Or q.’ He said no, that wasn’t fa—honest. He said I should leave out the eighteenth piece.”

“Oh, I see,” said Freddy. “You’re leaving out r.”

“Yes. But I said I wouldn’t do it unless he did too. So he said he would leave out t. Boy, you should listen to him. Has he found some fancy words!”

“That sounds like fun,” Mrs. Wiggins said. “Guess I’ll try it. What letter shall I leave out?”

“Try e,” said Freddy. “Now let’s hear you say something.”

“All right,” said the cow. “This isn’t so hard. Mr. Boomschmidt—”

“You can’t say ‘mister,’” Freddy interrupted.

“Good land, of course I can. It’s just Capital M, r.”

“It has an e in it,” said the pig. “When you say it.”

“Oh, all right,” said Mrs. Wiggins slowly. “Captain Boomschmidt—” She stopped. “Oh, gracious! What was I going to say? It’s gone-No, no; it’s—Ha, I got it! it’s vanished—vanisht with a t—out of my mind. Whew! I mean wow! That’s too hard.”

“Well, you took the hardest letter,” said Freddy, who didn’t remind her that he had picked it out. “E is used oftener in English than any other letter.”

“Take s,” Leo suggested.

“But then I can’t talk about more than one of anything,” said the cow. “Plurals are made with s.”

“Shucks, there are lots of plurals without s—men, mice, oxen, women, deer—”

“But I don’t want to talk about mice and men and oxen all the time. Suppose I want to talk about pigs. Do I say pice? Or what would be the plural of henhouse? Henhice?”

“Well,” said Leo, “if you want to talk about two pigs, you can say ‘a pig and a pig.’”

“I could say two piggen.”

“The chief says that kind of thing is not allowed. I said: couldn’t I talk like folks down South: couldn’t I say: ‘Mistah Boomschmidt is heah’? But he said that wasn’t playing the game.”

“You could talk baby-talk,” said Freddy. “I saw thwee wats wunning awound on the wacetwack. Though I suppose it would sound kind of silly coming from a lion.”

“No,” said Leo, “he said that was out too. And I can’t talk Chinaman talk either. You know: ‘thlee lats lunning alound the lace tlack.’ Well, it’s kind of fun, at that. Why don’t you tr—attempt it, pig?”

“I will, later. Right now we’ve got to check on this guy Anderson. We’ve had a tail on him, but that hasn’t got us anywhere. We’ve got to get inside his house and search it.

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