I’ll go to schools, I’ll read the book, I usually tell stories, but this one I read and I tell the children your job when I say and he did is to sing kee-kee-ree-kee. Oh, the enthusiasm, oh, the passion these children have.
So it’s really fun to read to children because they’re waiting for their cue. And so it has, it maybe that it has that. And also I love kee-kee-ree-kee. And some kids just told me that they did a study on all the ways that roosters, the rooster onomatopoeia sounds vary from country to country. And they came up with like 70. And it’s impossible that there were 70. I think these were sweet little children that wrote to me. I think may have been 17 and they just thought 70 sounded better. I don’t know. I have not done the field work on this.
But I do know there are many. In Russia there’s an entirely different sound than there is in Central and South America or in Europe. So maybe that’s part of it too is this sort of cool thing. This one little girl did say why didn’t you say cock-a-doodle-doo? And I said, well, because this story, because I am a Spanish-speaking American, and I love the story, I placed it in a Latin country and I wanted him to have this onomatopoeia sound of kee-kee-ree-kee.