Word: alphabets
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...book restates McLuhan's increasingly familiar argument: the introduction of the alphabet 3,000 years ago, abetted by Gutenberg's introduction of movable print in the 15th century, turned mankind into the alphas and omegas of a giant cultural alphabet soup. The "seamless" and communal thought processes of tribal, preliterate man were fragmented; perception itself took on the rigid, abecedarian character of writing. Letters led to the "idea," which required structure-beginning, middle, end-and forced the writer or reader out of immediate experience and into an abstracted, objective remove from "group reality." According to McLuhan, the advent...
...failure so brilliant that it can still illuminate the mind and gladden the spirit of all who do not regard words as mere tokens or tools, who see them as playthings capable of magic, creating awe by liturgy, or laughter by a conjurer's sleight of alphabet...
...confusion, they should have tuned in to the Nebraska Cornhuskers, who fumbled three times against Texas Christian, still won the game 14-10-partly because the Horned Frogs fumbled four times themselves. If it was variety, why, there was a whole alphabet of offensive formations out on the field: split T, spread T, power I, shifting I, crooked I. Duke used something called the split-end multiple T to bury West Virginia 34-15, and Michigan State's wing T soared over North Carolina State...
...Engelmanns say that a child has an "initial resistance" to learning, that "you must push him" and "make lessons a rigid part of his daily schedule." They urge parents to teach a baby names of parts of the body before he is 18 months old, start on the alphabet in five-minute lessons at 30 months, gradually work up to daily 90-minute lessons. The book details a sequence of teaching steps with specific instructions on how to get across such progressively more complex concepts as geometric shapes (by age three), counting backward (age four), fractions and inferences from statements...
Frenetic Blessing. Neither the nation's business nor its social life could have assumed today's form without the airlines. "Of all the inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted," wrote English Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1848, "those which abridge distance have done the most for the civilization of our species." The age of commercial jet travel, not yet eight years old, has not only shriveled distance to a degree far beyond Macaulay's vision, but has spread that frenetic blessing to hundreds of millions of people...