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You Could Look It Up (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

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“You Could Look It Up” is an unusual Thurber short story in point of view: that of an illiterate trainer employed by a major league baseball team. Thurber thereby adopts a technique already made famous by Ring Lardner, in which much of the humor derives from the way the speaker fractures the English language. Unlike the typical Lardner story, Thurber's also has a strong plot. The narrator recounts a story thirty years old, which prepares the reader for an old-fashioned “yarn.” It also makes more plausible the lowbrow characteristics of the trainer and the team members by...

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