A few days back, April 7th to be exact, I was thinking about grammar as I so often do, and was getting increasingly annoyed over the fact that people misuse the words “who” and “that”. When speaking about people we say “who”, like the boy who cried wolf. When speaking about objects we say “that”, like the ball that rolled. We don’t say the boy that cried wolf, because we’d be dehumanizing him. Back in 1954, Theodore Suess Geisel wrote a children’s book titled “Horton Hears a Who”. The main characters in this book aside from Horton himself are microscopic beings known as the Whos who live in Whoville.

These guys would later make an appearance in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and a few other less known books that branch off of both “Horton” and “Grinch”. But in the book for which they are created, they are portrayed as microscopic, voiceless characters. Only Horton can hear them due to his large elephant ears, but the rest of society decides that since they can’t hear the Whos, the Whos do not exist. This conflict is resolved with the entirety of Whoville banding together to make themselves heard by everyone, achieving their goal when the most reluctant little Who finally makes himself audible. No doubt, Dr. Seuss was creating an unforgettable children’s story in doing what he loved doing, which was writing. But he also achieved something else in doing another thing he loved—hiding messages behind the innocence of the children. Now there has been much debate over whether or not Geisel was attempting to bring to light the issue of abortion, but I personally believe that “Horton Hears a Who” is the result of Seuss’ feelings toward the lives of the children for whom he was writing books. Not as a business move, but out of genuine concern for the increasing amounts of infants being slaughtered, many as punishment for their parents’ irresponsibility. Otherwise, he would’ve called these minuscule characters something crazy, like “Dinglebloes” or something. He was making a very important statement when he named the tiny characters “Whos”, implying that unborn babies and even small children need to be seen as people rather than objects. After all, “even though you can’t see them or hear them at all, a person’s a person. No matter how small”.