The Gammage Cup - References To "Real World" Culture

References To "Real World" Culture

The book contains several clever references to our world in the things that Fooley brings back from his balloon ride.

  • The names of the periods are derived from common abbreviations (Ltd. means limited, Co. means county, Bros. means brothers, etc. (that's one too))
  • Paintings are family trees and family trees are paintings. This is because Fooley brought back a painting of a tree in front of a house and when the villagers matched the list written in Fooley's book with the things he had brought back they thought it was a family tree and they called the family tree a painting because it was the last thing left.
  • Fooley also brings back the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb and it is the prevailing opinion that something that doesn't follow its rhyme scheme and meter is not a poem but a scribble.

Read more about this topic:  The Gammage Cup

Famous quotes containing the words real, world and/or culture:

    The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    ... she was a woman. She had been taught from her earliest childhood to make use of this talent which God had endowed her, would be an outrage against society; so she lived for a few years, going through the routine of breakfasts and dinners, journeys and parties, that society demanded of her, and at last sank into her grave, after having been of little use to the world or herself.
    Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898)

    The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.
    Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)