Word: alphabets
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...bonanza for budget-conscious vacationers, ABCs are the latest addition to the confusing alphabet soup of special fares with which the airlines have been wooing cost-conscious travelers (see chart). Ironically, ABCs came into being last fall because of politics as much as economics-specifically, Gerald Ford's election-year advocacy of reduced Government regulation. The CAB yielded to pleas by the charter airlines to allow all carriers to offer, through travel agents, a more flexible plan: seats booked 30 to 45 days in advance, but no prepaid hotel accommodations and minimal restrictions on length of stay...
...based on the value of pi carried to the fourth decimal place: 3.1415. The 14 lines are divided into groups containing three, one, four, one and five lines-in that order. Perec's greatest verbalistic missile is a lipogram-a composition that completely omits one letter of the alphabet. There is not a single e in his highly praised novel, La Disparition-an omission that some critics failed to notice. "There were no problems of inspiration," recalls Perec. "After a while, the letters of the alphabet became the real characters of the novel." OuLiPoets have a host
...humored novels (Tlooth, The Conversions, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium), Mathews has recently composed poems to be printed on Mobius strips; works based on algorithms; and even a sentence that, spoken by a crow to a scarecrow, contains in sequence the sounds of all the letters in the alphabet: "Hay, be seedy! He-effigy, hate-shy jaky yellow man, oh peek, you are rusty, you've edible, you ex-wise he!" To fashion such creations, the OuLiPoians must be, as Martin Gardner characterizes them, "whimsical and slightly mad, as well as brilliant and too little known...
Despite its generally light touch, the new Catalog broaches some fairly sober issues. A thoughtful chapter on how the deaf can build a rewarding religious life outlines a sign-language worship service. Another section, on blindness, includes a Hebrew alphabet in braille. Other entries grapple with the ethical problems of premarital sex, contraception and abortion, trying to adapt the stern proscriptions of the Torah to more modern attitudes. Jewish divorce laws, for example, are weighted heavily in favor of the husband, making it difficult for the wife to start proceedings. The Catalog suggests ways to balance the inequality. "The important...
...poorest people in some areas of Southeast Asia and Africa have an annual income of little more than $100. In the era of space travel, electronics and cybernetics, 73% of the population of Africa, 46% of the Asians and 27% of the Latin Americans do not know the alphabet...