#thing explainer

A Person Paper on Purity in Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter (subverts the way we use gender and race in language by considering the ramifications of pronouns based on race rather than gender)

Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Anderson (explains atomic theory using only words of Germanic origin, rather than any Latin or Greek)

Ladle Red Rotten Hut by H. L. Chace (tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood using words with similar intonations but none of the original language. Best read out loud)

In book form: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (an epistolary novel about a community on an island where use of different letters of the alphabet is slowly outlawed, reducing the words available for use through the course of the book) and A Void by Georges Perec (a whole novel written without use of the letter e. This is a translation of the original French novel La Disparition)

November Just One Word BPC Day 2: Minimalist

by Randall Monroe (of XKCD fame)

Complicated Things in Simple Words is the byline of this book. It explains the basics of a wide variety of scientific topics using only the thousand most common words in the English language (roughly; he compiled his own list, based on other lists, based on what was funniest).

Simply put, this book is delightful. The second page is “Tiny bags of water that your body is made of”, and really it just keeps getting better. My favourite was the “Big tiny thing hitter” (aka the Large Hadron Collider). I am absolutely going to get my own copy for the coffee table.