23.9.11

Math mistakes in kids' books 2

This symmetry error comes from "5 minutter historie" (="5 minute stories"). The concept of this book is brilliant, about 50 stories each that can be read in five minutes. In the story "Princessen som aldri smilte" ("The princess who never smiled"), a princess is cursed by her nanny to never smile unless someone can guess her (the nanny's) name. The king and queen hire professional name guesses and try all manners of amusing the princess to get her to smile, but nothing works. One day, a painter makes a funny picture of the nanny and writes AMME (Norwegian for 'nanny') on the painting. The princess catches sight of the word reflected in the mirror and guesses "Emma" as the nanny's name, and the spell is broken.

OK, so apart from the idea that the kingdom guess every imaginable name but somehow forgot to try the common name 'Emma', can you spot the errors both in the text and the illustration?


PS: upon discussing these errors with my 8-year old daughter, she had to try writing words and looking at them in a mirror to discover what word was written on the painting. Afterwards, she became so fascinated with backwards writing that she's been doing it for days, leaving me "secret messages" that can only be read with help of a mirror! Maybe mistakes can be awesome sometimes!

1 comment: