Personal note ... problems, and Blanket Responses
I have a set of interacting problems this morning, and it may take me a little while to straighten them out:

1. This discussion has -- to my great pleasure -- grown so large that I'm having a hard time responding to the comments. (Not to mention the fact that, as many of us have pointed out, getting the responses to appear with the comments they belong to is almost impossible at this stage.) I'm going to do two Blanket Responses at the end of this post, just for clarity's sake. Thank you for all those comments; I appreciate them.

2. My e-mail has chosen this moment to go berserk. Not only am I now getting e-mails that I deleted or stashed in mid-November, I'm also getting two -- sometimes three -- copies of individual e-mails. I don't know whether the problem is in my Macintosh or at my server or is a Vast Twisted-Wing Conspiracy taking aim at me for my hubris or something else entirely. I'm working on it, but it's slowing me down.

3. My agent has just called me with yet another emergency that has to be taken care of yesterday....


Now to the Blanket Responses....

4. I really do believe that at least for the poverty population I've been posting about the key to the problem is the food and drink. Because the result of doing that wrong is brain damage, and brain damage doesn't go away. The wrong food and drink, for pregnant women and babies, means a kind of dumbing-down that can't be fixed, no matter how much money and good will you throw at the problem. Until that's fixed, I don't see any way out of the dilemma. [And I should note that although I've focused on one geographical area, all the parts of the world where pregnant women and infants suffer malnutrition are caught in the same trap. Whether it's famine or a deeply-entrenched cultural construct, the result is damaged brains. Often a whole generation of damaged brains.]

4. Some of you have said "Yes, you can write a book that is the nutritional equivalent of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense." I thank you for your vote of confidence -- but I have to disagree. When I wrote the GAVSD in 1979, it was in response to what I saw as an overwhelmingly urgent need, and I must have been right. (I base that judgment on the fact that librarians tell me it's one of the most-frequently-stolen books, it has sold way over a million copies and is still selling, and -- most importantly -- a lot of the mail I get about that book is written in pencil on ruled paper, with lots of erasings and rewritings, which tells me that the person writing doesn't often write letters. When I wrote that book my goal was to write it in such a way that anybody who'd made it through tenth grade would be able to read it easily. My colleagues in linguistics have made me pay for that, but if I had it to do over again the only change I'd make would be to write it in such a way that anybody who'd made it through sixth grade would be able to read it easily. But "verbal self-defense," in those days, was a new and catchy topic; it caught people's eyes in spite of the ugly cover. And Barnes & Noble got in there and marketed the daylights out of that book, with full page ads not only in the New Yorker but also in publications for veterans and in Sunday newspaper supplements .... they were all over the cultural/cognitive map with those ads. They did an ad that became a classic -- the one that advised people to get their "black belt in verbal self-defense" by reading the book, and they put it everywhere.

I don't know any way to package basic nutritional information for pregnant women and parents of tiny babies that would have that sort of appeal. It's true that when I wrote the GAVSD I was taking on a deeply-entrenched cultural construct -- the one that said "Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you, and if you can't handle those hostile words there's something wrong with you." And somehow I got past that. A lot of the credit goes to B&N and their marketing dollars. A lot goes to the fact that in those days I was young enough and strong enough to get out there and do endless workshops and seminars and bookstore signings and talks; I can't do that anymore. But changing the nutritional practices that I've been posting about would mean admitting that the traditional ones have been harming the children -- the way accepting the truth about secondhand smoke meant admitting to yourself that you'd been harming those you loved. That's a huge burden of guilt. It would hurt. People are already hurting. I don't see a way to persuade them to accept even more hurt, and in their place I'm reasonably certain that I'd behave exactly as they're behaving -- by fiercely defending my own parenting practices, and those of my parents and grandparents before me.

I'm grateful to you for being willing to discuss all this; it may be that the discussion will joggle something loose in my mind and show me a way to tackle this problem usefully. Or maybe one or more of you, most of you younger and stronger, will find a way and do it yourselves. But it hasn't happened yet.