Jul 8, 2008

99% is closer to 0% than to 100%

Graphemes never mean

A living thing is not necessarily aware that it is in a medium

Inhale until your lungs are uncomfortably full

Native Spanish-speakers struggle with English because the graphemes and phonemes don’t correspond one-to-one like they do in Spanish

Things never touch

Don't let anyone else read this

Explain why the ending of “canoe” sounds just like that of “zoo” but different from that of “toe”

The concept of alphabetization is absent in Chinese; characters are grouped by their primary brushstroke and ordered within that group by number of brushstrokes

We put larger spaces between words than between letters to differentiate which sets of letters comprise each word and to discretely identify each word from the others in a text

This is not what you see

As in the example of the anglerfish, many animals have been given names that relate their behavior or characteristics to those of humans, often inaccurately so

If one decided subsequently to spell “differentiate” with a starting s instead of a starting d, people would be thrown briefly but then assume an error had been made and they’d disregard it

You are surveilling this

Comprehend these four words

In order to record a complete taxonomy of the animal kingdom, every unique individual must be identified as such

Every sixth word can be removed from a text and the meaning is not substantially interfered with

The faces of born-blind people look different from those of the sighted

Written language is an agent of isolation

Remove all the vowels from this

The chickadee is named after an approximate conversion of the sound of its call into English, although birds routinely add two or more dees to their calls and drop the middle a entirely

99% is 0%

You can't even touch yourself

2 comments:

Brent Cunningham said...

or: you're constantly touching yourself.

Nicholas Manning said...

Just. Excellent.