In this fun, off-the-books chat that was simply too good not to share, Mignon and Valerie Fridland discuss the "charming mistake" that inspired Valerie's book cover. Learn how an artist’s attempt to illustrate the word "talk" ran into a classic linguistic snag: the difference between how we spell a word and how we actually say it.
In this fun, off-the-books chat that was simply too good not to share, Mignon and Valerie Fridland discuss the "charming mistake" that inspired Valerie's book cover. Learn how an artist’s attempt to illustrate the word "talk" ran into a classic linguistic snag: the difference between how we spell a word and how we actually say it.
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More from Valerie at valeriefridland.com
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Valerie, so I said in the main show we were going to talk about the cover of your book and the lips on it and what they mean, because you had told me before, and now it turns out it’s changed. They don’t mean what I thought they meant. So, can you explain the story of the cover?
Valerie Fridland: Sure. Well, it was inspired by exactly the story you’re talking about, and “talk” is the pivotal word here, because originally, when the artist was conceiving of the book cover idea, they had thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to have the lips on the cover spell out ‘talk’?”
Mignon Fogarty: Right, it’s like four graphics of lips that go down the side of the cover and they’re different colors.
Valerie Fridland: Right, and they’re all in kind of different shapes. And so the artist that designed the cover thought, “Oh, it’s going to be great. I’m going to think about how my lips are shaped when I say ‘talk,’” and, you know, T-A-L-K was what he was thinking and then make the lips accordingly to that. So, then they sent us the cover version that had been designed, and I was looking at it and I thought, “Well, this is a great cover,” I loved it, which is sort of basically the rendering it is now where it has the four lips in a row. It was slightly different colors and things, but I didn’t at all get that part of it. And so the artist said, “Oh, by the way, here’s what I did. Here’s why I got those,” because the funny thing is, two of the lips were identical and that kind of was odd. So, I was like, “Why are they not all different?” And he’s like, “Oh, because of the way we say ‘talk.’” And I’m like, “What? What do you mean by that?” because I had no idea that that’s what he had done. He’s like, “Oh, well, it’s T-A-L-K.” And I thought, “Oh my gosh, I love it. I love that that was what inspired you, but the problem is that the spelling of ‘talk’ and the pronunciation of ‘talk’ is actually not the same in terms of how many sounds there are. So, when we say ‘talk,’ there are three sounds. When we spell ‘talk,’ there are four sounds. So, if you’re putting four sounds on the book, it’s actually not correct according to how we’re pronouncing it.” So, we had to kind of scrap that and instead we stuck an extra mouth with a different shape on it. But it was just—it’s such a charming story because I loved that that’s how he was inspired by how our mouth are shaped. But the fact is it points to something I talk about in the book, which is that spelling and saying are very, very different. And a lot of times we say sounds that don’t appear in spelling or we spell with letters that don’t appear in the way we speak. And “talk” was a perfect example.
Mignon Fogarty: Perfect. So, it’s inspired by “talk” but not representative of “talk.”
Valerie Fridland: Exactly. Exactly. But it gave us a good cover idea, so I stuck with it.
Mignon Fogarty: That’s great.