Re: instantaneous recall of letter order in alphabet

Joachim Pense <snob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:13sgt70ls7trl.oq0edyp1npho$.dlg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Am Tue, 9 Jan 2007 19:21:16 -0500 schrieb Oliver Cromm:

OTOH, no one I asked so far knew instantaneously where the first half of
the alphabet ends. I guess I should ask more librarians.

Well, I do. (I just tried to answer your question spontaneously)

The reason is that as a child I had a toy abacus (or toy slate or
something) with the letters printed along the frame in an U shape,
starting with A on the upper left, ending with Z in the upper right. M
and N were the middle in the bottom. As this U shape became my
permanent mental image of the alphabet, I'd immediately say: "It's
M!".

My knowledge that ^M is ASCII 13 and there are 26 letters in the
alphabet served as a verification.
Joachim

I guess the reason why you remember ^M as ASCII 13
(or hex D) is the fact that ^M is a frequently occuring
Carriage Return character, right? :-)

So your toy abacus didn't have characters like sharp-S
and umlauts?

pjk


.

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