I realized the other day that all of the vowels in the English language are in odd positions in the alphabet (even if you count ‘y’ as a vowel). If you label the letters a,b,c,… as 1,2,3,…, then a,e,i,o,u,y are, respectively, 1,5,9,15,21,25. Quite a nice little progression.<\/p>\n
This suggests that we could throw out all of the even letters of the alphabet, and still have an interestingly rich set of letters to work with: a,c,e,g,i,k,m,o,q,s,u,w,y. We could then define an “completely odd word” (or “COW” for short) as a word that only uses this subset of the alphabet. There so many COWs, like ACE, QUICK and SEQUOIA, that the mind boggles (sorry — couldn’t resist).<\/p>\n
The word COW is itself a COW, oddly enough. I wonder what kind of speeches could be written using nothing but COWs. I guess a speech with nothing but COWs might be called a “maximally odd oration”, or a “MOO”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I realized the other day that all of the vowels in the English language are in odd positions in the alphabet (even if you count ‘y’ as a vowel). If you label the letters a,b,c,… as 1,2,3,…, then a,e,i,o,u,y are, respectively, 1,5,9,15,21,25. Quite a nice little progression. This suggests that we could throw out all … Continue reading “COW”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3732"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3732"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3737,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3732\/revisions\/3737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}