Friday, March 11, 2011

"A" is for Actually Awful Attempted Alphabet Awaiting Audience Appraisal

I remember reading long ago that of all of the hundreds of books that Isaac Asimov wrote, his least favourite was his set of science ABC books. He found it maddening to have to omit vocabulary absolutely central to the topic because it happened to start with the same letter as an even more important word. "S", I recall, posed a big problem when writing his ABC's of Space. Should he pick "star", "Saturn", "satellite", "solar flares", or "space" itself? Meanwhile, other letters offered a dearth of relevant, interesting words so he had to take a concept from a doublebooked letter and pin it to the lacking letter with a lesser word. Oh, Asimov, I feel your pain!

























4 comments:

  1. I think I got most of them... But not A, G, I, K, Q, V, or W.

    ...Haha, so perhaps I should say that at least I got some of them!

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  2. With a little research you should be able to get A, G, K, and Q. The other three, though, are lame words I threw in because of a lack of alternatives. "I" is for Instruments. "V" is for Village Life as opposed to the preceeding "U" is for Urban Areas. "W" is for Wind. It should have been for Water Wheel.

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  3. Dad had trouble with I,J,L,S,& Z The photos are great as usual. I know that the children will use this as a learning tool. Have a great day Dad M

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  4. Daddy, if I intended it as a learning tool for children, "A" would have been for "archery", not "ara". :)

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