The words used in early years texts come from a long history of ways to explain how we perceive the world, as Jennie Lindon and Drew Lindon explain Many books for students of early childhood studies, but also aimed at practitioners, now feature terms such as postmodern, poststructural, deconstruction and discourse. If these ideas are to be useful to readers, the words and concepts need to be explained. For a decent detective job on origins and meanings, it has been necessary to bring together the knowledge of both authors of this article: early years/psychology (Jennie Lindon) and sociology (Drew Lindon).