ABSTRACT
Favourite stories are a different case again. Here, we do all want to share in the meanings that are being explored, but the words that are used are often not the same as the ones for everyday use, or if they are, they are combined in ways different from those heard at the breakfast table or the bus stop:
A tired parent, wanting to get out of reading a bedtime story, might try to get away with a retelling: ‘We’ve had this one before: you remember there was a box, in a corner of a cupboard, behind a curtain, along a passage . . . ’. It just won’t do. What we have here is not a boring repetitious use of the word ‘dark’; here we have the opportunity to scare ourselves witless, even though we’ve heard the story many times before and we know there’s only a mouse at the end. The repetition of the word, together with the wonderful illustrations, works on us like a spell.3
