Eerie timing - or inspiration?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9552210
It bothers me I remember it distinctly as "Berenstein", but I try not to dwell on that too much.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9552210
It bothers me I remember it distinctly as "Berenstein", but I try not to dwell on that too much.
I think the most plausible explanation for me is that they pronounced it "Bear-en-steen" in the videos so as a kid I just assumed that was reflected in the actual spelling.
So thankfully I never struggled with the actual spelling and questioning my sanity over it.
After reading the article, I do vaguely recall some childhood cognitive dissonance over the fact that it was pronounced "steen" but spelled "stain"... but my main memory is of the pronunciation, not the spelling. If you'd asked me before reading this, I'd've sworn up and down it was spelled "Berenstein".
Looking at artwork and pictures of it, you'll notice the lowercase 'a' is used in the titles of the book, and this looks a lot like an 'e' in cursive, which furthered the confusion.
I was reading about it and caught a picture of a poster for the TV show on another website, and realized that when the words were written in title case or UPPER CASE, then all of a sudden the 'A' looked right and the 'E' looked wrong!
So my visual memory of the 'A' is intact, but only in the uppercase form, where the visual difference is stark.
In the lower-case cursive form (used on so many of the book titles from the time period I had them), it's so easy to see it as an 'E' when that's the pronounciation that everyone tended to use.
I mean do you know anyone with a last name ending in -stain vs. -stein or -stine?
Not me.
The mind is a strange thing.