all in a name

It is a delight to watch a five year old burst into peals of loud laughter at the image conjured up by the words of a fairy tale; it can also be an amusing surprise to see the source of that laughter. Carson's laughter last night over the rhymes of Dr. Seuss was easy to understand, but tonight it caught me a bit off guard. We had settled on the story of "Lazy Jack" from my Child's Book of fairy Tales, in which little Jack has a series of amusingly confused efforts to heed his mother's advice. Carson was understandably tickled at the idea of Jack carrying a donkey upside down on his shoulders. But he also literally rolled on the floor when I told how Jack had carried meat home from the butcher by dragging it behind him with a rope--now what Carson laughed so hard about, though, was not the image itself but the word used . . . for some reason, he found the word "mutton" to be the most hilarious thing he had apparently heard in quite some time!