Word: alphabetizes
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...death twelve years ago, Playwright Shaw, an Irishman with a masterful but impatient command of English, left ?8,300 ($23,240) in trust to help eliminate phonetic vagaries from the English alphabet. Characteristically, he suggested that the best way to do it would be to scrap the whole thing and start afresh, and the prizewinner, a devoted English phonetist named Kingsley Read, did just that. The results of his work have just been released by Penguin Books: a trial edition of Androcles and the Lion, Shaw's famous dramatic spoof of early Christians and Romans, with the English alphabet...
Following a number of Shavian stipulations, the Shaw-Read alphabet has 48 symbols, including 24 separate vowel sounds so that no matter what their context each one can be pronounced the same way. Its letters come in several matching-size categories such as "talls" and "deeps" (tails turned upside down). For example...
...drops rafts of silent e's, of course, and the four most commonly used words in English (the, of, and, to) economically get by with just one symbol each ( ? , f , , -I,). Logically, too, the new alphabet does away with Shaw's own favorite example of the phonetic madness of the present alphabet, the fact that phonetically "ghoti" spells "fish."* In Shaw-Read, "fish" is clearly J , i and "ghoti" is forever ? o -I « . All this is not likely to compensate new readers for the strange look of the new letters. Because Shaw insisted on discarding all familiar...
...whom the disposal of waste is a burden . . . especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products." Thus does Author Janet Frame begin a strange book about three wasted lives in a dim world that she calls "the edge of the alphabet." The phrase has a properly demented ring, and because Novelist Frame, in both fact and fiction, has spent some time in asylums, the reader at first thinks he is once more on the now depressingly familiar fictional grounds of a mental institution...
Instead, the edge of the alphabet proves to be a nebulous psychological limbo whose inhabitants are all the lonely, half-crippled, emotional misfits who exist on the pallid fringes of the everyday world. It is presided over by a weird, bodiless, placeless woman, Thora Pattern, from whose papers the story purports to be taken. Roving back and forth in time, to and fro in her subjects' minds, Thora Pattern records the edge-of-the-alphabet lives of three people seen on a boat trip from New Zealand and in London after...