The Schwa was Here
Chapters (28)
- Cover
- LAB JOURNAL
- Title Page
- Dedication
- 1. Manny Bullpucky Gets His Sorry Butt Hurled Off the Marine Park Bridge
- 2. The Weird and Mostly Tragic History of the Schwa, Which Is Entirely True If You Trust My Sources
- 3. Quantizing the Schwa Effect Using the Scientific Method, and All That Garbage
- 4. Making Big Bucks off of Stealth Economics, Because Maybe I Got Some Business Sense
- 5. Which Is Worse: Getting Mauled by a Pack of Dogs, or Getting Your Brains Bashed Out by a Steel Poker?
- 6. As If I Didn’t Already Have Enough Annoying Things to Do Every Day, Now I Gotta Do This
- 7. The Lowest-Paid Male Escort on the Entire Eastern Seaboard, Except for Maybe the Bronx
- 8. Are Those Your Fingers in My Mouth, or Are You Just Happy to Not See Me?
- 9. Maybe They Had It Right in France Because Getting My Head Lopped Off by a Guillotine Would Have Been Easier
- 10. Earthquakes, Nuclear Winter, and the End of Life as We Know It, over Linguini
- 11. The Youngest Doctor in Sheepshead Bay Gets Held Hostage When He Least Expects It
- 12. A Horror Movie Blow-by-Blow, with the Undisputed Queen of the 3-B Club
- 13. A Russian Train, a Pulsing Vein, and My Mother’s Bag of Snails
- 14. More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About the Schwa’s Childhood
- 15. Vortex in Aisle Three—Can Someone Please Clean Up the Ectoplasmic Slime?
- 16. A Late-Night Trip to the Land of Beef That Could Turn a Person into a Vegetarian
- 17. A Traumatic Experience I’ll Live to Regret, Assuming I Live
- 18. Larger Than Life, in Your Face, Undeniable Schwa
- 19. The Schwa Gets Radiation Therapy in a Room That Doesn’t Smell Too Good No Matter How Much It’s Disinfected
- 20. The Weird Things Kids Do Don’t Even Come Close to the Weird Things Parents Do
- 21. Why I Started Vandalizing Brooklyn
- 22. My Anonymous Contribution to Popular Culture and to My Parents’ Phone Bill
- DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- Special Excerpt from SHIP OUT OF LUCK
Cover
LAB JOURNAL
The Schwa Effect: Experiment #1
Hypothesis: The Schwa will be functionally invisible in your standard classroom.
Materials: Nine random students, one classroom, the Schwa.
Procedure: We set nine students and the Schwa seated around an otherwise empty classroom (if you don’t count the hamsters and the guinea pig in the back). Then we dragged other students into the room, and asked them to do a head count.
Results: Three out of five students refused to go into the classroom on account of they thought there’d be a bucket of water over the door, or something nasty like that, which is understandable because we’ve been known to play practical, and less practical, jokes. Eventually we managed to round up twenty students to go into the room, count the people in the room, then report back to us. Fifteen students said that there were nine people in the room. Four students said there were ten. One student said there were seventeen (we believe he counted the hamsters and guinea pig).
Conclusion: Four out of five people do not see the Schwa in your standard classroom.
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THE
SCHWA
WAS
HERE
Title Page
Neal Shustərman
THE
SCHWA
WAS
HERE
Dedication
For my grandparents Gussie and Dave Altman,
who will always be the spirit of Brooklyn to me
Schwa: The faint vowel sound in many unstressed syllables in the English language. It is signified by the pronunciation “uh” and represented by the symbol e. For example, the e in overlook, the a in forgettable, and the o in run-of-the-mill.
It is the most common vowel sound in the English language.