By Mary Morel
Unusual words
1. What do the following words have in common: banana, dresser, assess, grammar, potato, revive, uneven?
2. Name four words in the English language which end in -dous?
3. What two words contain all five vowels in order (with some consonants in between)?
4. Using just one row of your keyboard, what is the longest word you can write?
Answers
1. If you take the first letter and place it at the end of the word and then spell the word backwards, it’s the same word.
2. tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, hazardous
3. abstemious, facetious
4. typewriter
Phasing in Euro English
In the first year, ‘s’ will replace the soft ‘c’. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. Also, the hard ‘c’ will be dropped in favor of the ‘k’. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter. The ‘C’ kan have two lines drawn through it and be used for the new EURO kurrensy symbol.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome ‘ph’ will be replaced with the ‘f’. This will make words like ‘fotograf’ 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent ‘e’s in the languag is disgrasful, and they should go away.
By the 4th yer, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing ‘th’ with ‘z’ and ‘w’ with ‘v’. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary ‘o’ kan be dropd from vords kontaining ‘ou’ and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.
ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!
Alzheimer’s eye test
How many ‘f’s are there in the following text?
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…
Did you spot all six of them? Or did you miss the ‘f’s in ‘of’? If you did, you’re not alone. A lot of people don’t spot them.
Online grammar programs
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