DON'T SAY POOP!

Silly, rhyming euphemisms to jazz up powder-room humor.

Matejek-Morris shows remarkable wordsmithing skill in his laugh-out-loud lines of text. The narrator is depicted as a child who opens the book with a warning: “There are nice words like puppy and buttercup and snickerdoodle, and there are rude words.” To help readers avoid saying rude words, the child then delivers a torrent of tongue-twisting, rhyming euphemisms for poop, pee, burp, belch, butt, boogers, and farts. For the titular rude word, for instance, readers could substitute “humdrum bum crumbs, / float-or-sinker, / major stinker, / sometimes mushy from your tushy, / smelly belly funky jelly.” It all culminates in a cumulative barrage of words that readers will be hard-pressed to say without dissolving into giggles—unless they are distracted and dismayed by some truly unfortunate visual characterization. The protagonist is depicted as a brown-skinned person with black, curly hair. Color associations in the cover art and some interior pages may cause the eye to link the shade of the character’s skin with the anthropomorphized turds that appear along with the aforementioned euphemisms. If that weren’t bad enough, when the cumulative text arrives, it’s presented as a grinning (and farting, urinating, defecating, belching, nose-picking) tap-dancing spectacle that evokes caricatures of minstrelsy. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8-by-14-inch double-page spreads viewed at 50.1% of actual size.)

Just…don’t.