A font for dyslexics

By now you have probably heard the joke about the dyslexic agnostic who was also an insomniac. He would lie awake nights wondering if there was a dog. Dyslexia is the tendency to rotate, mirror, swap and reverse letters and numerals. Once in a while you might write 96 instead of 69, for example. For some people this tendency to mix up letters can be so bad it interferes with their ability to decipher written text.

I recently ran into an article about a font designed to demphasize the symmetry of our letters to make them easier to distinguish. I don’t know if the font works as intended, but the concept is interesting.

Here’s a diagram of a couple letters to give you the idea. The Scientific American article goes into greater detail, and has more pictures. Go take a look.

The font is named Dyslexie

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Wordplay is almost anything that involves language and humor. Or at least clever or interesting if not necessarily humorous. Here’s a link to a site that has a long list of different kinds of wordplay. It’s called Scorpio Tales, which is a pun on scorpion tails. Wordplay includes puns (of course) but also palindromes, anagrams, and—well, take a look at the list. Be sure to check out the Tom Swifties near the bottom.

Not a real scorpion. It's his name, apparently.

I ran into this several years ago. We had a visiting English teacher from Russia at the tme, and she got through the whole thing, Russian accent notwithstanding. Her English was pretty good, but she insisted on saying “poisonous ivy” instead of “poison ivy.”

See how fast you can read it aloud:

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

I believe the author is someone named G. Nolst Trenité.

Yesterday my wife and I celebrated our ninth anniversary of wedded bliss. We have a tradition that I write her a poem every year to celebrate. For your amusement, here is a quatrain I wrote, then rejected.

A nine-year party, now who’d’a thunk it?
With me so old, that’s quite a junket
‘Cause she’s a young, good lookin’, chick,
At least she likes my manly oops

(You didn’t think I’d really write that, did you?) The one she got was much nicer and more romantic, and I set it in an old-fashioned font (small x-height) nicely formatted on a page. She has a picture frame in her office where she puts the most recent poem. The bad poem, above, is a quatrain consisting of four accentual feet each, rhyme scheme AABB. The good poem, which I’m not sharing unless my wife asks me to, contains four couplets, each consisting of a double dactyl and a molossus. (Look it up. They’re not supposed to exist in English poetry, but I can do ’em.)

Update: Not only does my wife want me to post the “good” poem, but she wrote me one! so if you can stand all the sentimental treacle, here are two more poems. Mine first:

Year nine

Valerie George is my
Dear sweet wife.
Hug her and kiss her my
Whole sweet life.
Tease me and please me my
Whole life long,
Mess me or bless me, my
Life a song.

Just so you know: Four couplets, each consisting of a double dactyl and a molossus.

She said the footnote was very me. (I should add that I read her to sleep every night when I’m home.) Here’s her poetic reply:

Read to me
All my days
Of Science and farming
And kids and their ways.
Your voice fills my mind
With beautiful phrases.
Whether couplets or dactyls
To me it amazes
The love of my life
Gives the gift of his voice
Reassuring to me that I made a wise choice!
The sound of my love fulfills all my wishes,
The only thing sweeter…one of his kisses.

You might be wondering what we look like. Here’s a picture of us.

Valerie and her curmudgeon

I might have posted about this mistake before, but here’s a nice comic to remind you about it. People misinterpret “the exception proves the rule”  almost  as often as they get “beg the question” wrong ( I’ve written about that one, too.). Recently I discovered a comic that’s been around at least since 2007 (so I have some catching up to do in my copious spare time), and a recent strip mentions this expression.

Kieran Meehan writes a clever strip about some professional people and crooks called Pros and Cons. Here’s the strip:

I haven't figured out all the characters, but the gal on the right runs a diner and she's the sister of one of the other characters

Most people (in my experience, anyway) think that the exception proving a rule means that when something breaks a rule, it illustrates the existence of the rule because you notice the exception to it. BRAAP! Completely wrong.

“Prove” is an old word for “test.” There’s the famous reference to tithing in the Old Testament book of Malachi that goes “Prove me now herewith and bring all the tithes into the storehouse…” We still use the word prove in a testing sense in certain contexts, such as when someone says something like “Well, let’s see if the plane proves airworthy.”

What this expression means is that to really find out is a rule is for real, you have to break (the exception) it (the rule) and see what happens. If something bad happens because you broke the rule, yup, it’s a rule, all right. If nothing happens, it wasn’t relly a rule in the first place.

Children do this to their parents all the time. Don’t make a rule unless you’re willing to enforce it. Does this comic get the expression right or wrong? I’m not sure—I haven’t figured it out yet, but it’s funny.