Frindle is a children's novel written by the American author Andrew Clements and illustrated by the illustrator Brian Selznick. It came out in 1996.
The book tells the story of a fifth-grade boy named Nick Allen. Nick is bored of calling a pen a pen, and decides to start calling it a frindle (hence the title) instead. The name catches on among his classmates, then the whole school, and finally the whole country.
Clements described the idea as having come to him in the form of the thought, "What would happen if a kid started using a new word, and other kids really liked it, but his English teacher didn’t?" The book can be seen on one level as an illustration of language change, but at a deeper level of the power of ordinary people to set in motion world-changing ideas.
From the back of the book:
- Is Nick Allen a troublemaker?
- He really just likes to liven things up at school -- and he's always had plenty of great ideas. When Nick learns some interesting information about how words are created, suddenly he's got the inspiration for his best plan ever ... the frindle. Who says a pen has to be called a pen? Why not call it a frindle? Things begin innocently enough as Nick gets his friends to use the new word. Then other people in town start saying frindle. Soon the school is in an uproar, and Nick has become a local hero. His teacher wants Nick to put an end to all this nonsense, but the funny thing is frindle doesn't belong to Nick anymore. The new word is spreading across the country, and there's nothing Nick can do to stop it.
See also: etymology, historical linguistics
