Frindle
A children's novel by Andrew Clements.
Nicholas Allen has plenty of ideas. Who can forget the time he turned his third-grade classroom into a tropical island, or the times he fooled his teacher by chirping like a blackbird? But now Nick's in fifth grade, and it looks like his days as a troublemaker are over.
Everyone knows that Mrs. Granger, the language arts teacher, has X-ray vision, and nobody gets away with anything in her classroom. To make matters worse, she's also a fanatic about the dictionary, which is hopelessly boring to Nick. But when Nick learns an interesting tidbit about words and where they come from, it inspires his greatest plan yet: to invent a new word. From now on, a pen is no longer a pen -- it's a frindle.
It doesn't take long for frindle to take root, and soon the excitement spreads well beyond his school and town. His parents and Mrs. Granger would like Nick to put an end to all this nonsense. But frindle doesn't belong to Nick anymore. All he can do now is sit back and watch what happens.
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: Mrs. Granger likes to come up with interesting punishments, such as sticking a student's chewing gum on a card and pinning it to the student's shirt for the rest of the day.
- Dog Latin: "But I guess that if the Latin word for feather had been frindilus instead of pinna, then you probably would have invented the word pen instead."
- Forbidden Fruit: Mrs. Granger's ban on the word frindle makes it all that more appealing to the students.
- Genre Savvy: Mrs. Lorelei Granger
- Gone Horribly Right: Nick gets "punished" early in the book when he tries to nudge Mrs. Granger into talking about the dictionary so that she'll forget to assign that day's homework. She instead assigns him a speech about the origins of the dictionary due tomorrow, and Nick turns it into the longest filibuster he has ever done.
- Nick later considers the spread of "frindle" to be this.
- Nick also tries to test the blackbird's ability to fool predators with its chirp in class. Sure enough, his teacher gets confused, and mistakenly punishes his friend Janet. Luckily, the two make up, and later more fun confused their teacher with chirps, which she decides to just ignore.
- Heel Realization: When she gets over her initial overreaction, Mrs. Granger realizes that she has ended up in the villain role and decides to play it up to help "frindle" along.
- Nick too when he realizes just how much of an wide effect his pranks have had. Cue Heroic BSOD.
- Heroic BSOD / My God, What Have I Done?: Nick, but Mrs. Granger talks him out of it.
- Holding the Floor: Nick turns an oral report into an epic lesson-stalling filibuster.
- No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: All the publicity just helps to strengthen and spread Nick's word.
- Perfectly Cromulent Word: Take a guess.
- "Quiz" is brought up in the book as another example of one.
- Reverse Psychology
- Start X to Stop X: Mrs. Granger pulls this to help spread the word.
- Stealth Mentor: Mrs. Granger, in case you haven't realized yet.
- Stern Teacher: Take a wild guess.
- Streisand Effect: All attempts to stop Nick's new word from spreading simply help it along.
- Writing Lines: To enforce her ban on the word frindle, Mrs. Granger makes them stay after school and write "I am writing this with a pen" 100 times. The students make a game of seeing how many times they can get away with changing the sentence to "I am writing this with a frindle."