Lexicon
Green Eggs and Ham is one of Seuss's "Beginner Books", written in a very simple vocabulary for beginning readers.
The vocabulary of the text consists of just fifty different words and was the result of a bet between Seuss and Bennett Cerf (Dr. Seuss's publisher) that Seuss (after completing The Cat in the Hat using 225 words) could not complete an entire book using so few words.
The 50 are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.
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Famous quotes containing the word lexicon:
“According to Father’s lexicon people who started on a job and didn’t stay at it for 50 years were “quitters.” If you stayed 20 years and then shifted to more congenial work you were a “drifter.””
—Richard Bissell (1913–1977)
“Psychobabble is ... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.”
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)