“Is it bigger than a breadbox?”


Where are all those wooden nickels?I asked a student, “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” today. Their blank look reminded me that the older I get, the further removed I become from the popular lingo of my students. I have no desire to immerse myself fully in the vocabulary of my students, but I can leech unto them the background of some of my “Pingo Lingo.”

When I was a kid we would travel by station wagon, between Prince Albert and Saskatoon, and we would play “20 Questions“. We would each take turns thinking of something, and we would then each in turn ask questions until we where able to guess what the person was thinking. The first question was always, “Is it bigger than a breadbox?”