Lists: Green Eggs and Ham

The entire 50 word lexicon of Green Eggs and Ham:

a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you

Rob Giampietro (in The Mavenist’s Permutations and Loops):

“In the right hands, the most ordinary things can take on extraordinary meanings. “The Cat in the Hat” came about when Dr Seuss was asked by William Ellsworth Spaulding, Houghton Mifflin’s education director, to compose a text for six-year-olds using a lexicon of only the 348 words they should developmentally know. “The Cat in the Hat” uses 223 words that are on the list and 13 that are not. It had sold more than 10.5 million copies by 2007. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf then bet Seuss $50 he couldn’t do a book in just 50 words. The result was “Green Eggs and Ham,” one of the weirdest, most delightful books around.”