| The Art of Lettering |
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My daughter always insists on knowing what I'm doing, and more often than not will decide to try whatever it is out for herself. I innocently demonstrated to her what a slight sense of embarrassment makes me keep concealed from third parties. Why was I keying the alphabet twenty times over? To limber up at the start of the working day, manually speaking. I felt that subjecting her to my idea of how the rapid switching between the right and left hands had a way of causing the temperature in the narrow link between the left and right lobes of the brain to go up, thus possibly contributing to stopping Alzheimer's Disease in its tracks, would be overdoing it, although now I'm not so sure: as I was rooting around for the right words, she asked why the characters on the keyboard hadn't simply been placed in their rightful places, A next to B, and so on. Which set me off into an explanation about how the first typewriters - do you know what a typewriter is? No, daddy. Wait, I've got one from 1924, it has little arms. Blank gaze - were so far from perfect that the inventors had to come up with a method to slow down the actual keying motion, which they found in this highly irrational sequence of characters, and as my daughter had just hit the letters QWERTY, I took the opportunity to explain that the French used AZERTY instead, and duly lost the argument. Completely unfazed, she set about typing. This is what she created: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz |