20 Things You Didn’t Know About Dr. Seuss

Thanks to his love of language, Geisel is usually credited with inventing the word “nerd.” It appeared in his 1950 book, If I Ran the Zoo. However, it wasn’t popularized as a slang term until the 1960s.

Geisel found it tiresome and difficult to answer the question: “Where do your ideas come from?” He responded in a very Seussian way: “I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called Über Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock fixed. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people, and I get my ideas from them.”

read more by ALISON NASTASI

20 Things You Didn’t Know About Dr. Seuss – Flavorwire