Have you felt that English wasn’t rationally constructed? Do you ever wonder, for instance, why we made “affect” and “effect” seem so similar when they mean two different things? Or why “you’re” are “your” sound identical, but are dissimilar in meaning? Couldn’t we have designed something little bit more simple? About two decades ago, a group in Washington, D.C. attempted to do just that. CONTINUE READING »

Do you ever stop and look at the shape of our alphabet? Each letter looks natural to us now, but all those lines and circles have unique histories. It’s easy to make assumptions that our letters make sense, that they developed in some orderly logical way, and one reasonable assumption would be that P and R are related to each other based on their form. CONTINUE READING »