Tuesday 26 December 2023

Chinese boggle

In the run up to Dau.II's driving test, I was, several times, unceremoniously shoved out of The Grape in various bleak settings in SW Waterford City. My place being taken by Damian the driving instructor or Darren the driving tester. What to do? Driving School Centraal in Woodie's Car Park is a brisk 15 minute walk from, say, the City Library; but the RSA driving test centre is way off on the Ring Road. I had ~45 minutes to kill there, the drizzle was light, so I headed off towards a Stuff Shop called The Range which we'd passed on the way into the industrial estate. So much to tempt the unwary:

  • Arthritis Glass Jar Opener Lid Remover - White
  • Counter Top Ice Maker Machine - Copper
  • Peppa Pig Acoustic Guitar - Blue
  • Industrial Iron Bar Chair - Dark Brown
  • Cat Cave - Navy

But I got caught in the craft section and bought one "Pack of 100 Art Studio Wooden Alphabet Beads" for what-could-possibly-go-wrong? €1.30. I thought they'd make a novelty stocking filler for Gdau.II [8] at Christmas. Returning home, I spilled the 1cm x 1cm cubes into a shallow bowl, resolved to thread the beads on a bit of string so that it spelled something nice. My nice is not Gdau.II's nice, though . . . I don't believe in unicorns for starters. The letter-bracelet -necklace was just an idea. 

I scrabbled about looking for an S - the 8th most common letter in English and the normal way of making the plural. There was only one S! - and that a mis-shape. If you count this hirpled S, there was at least one bead representing each of our 26 letters, rarities like Q Z and J included. So the composition of the bag-of-100 cannot be random.  The beads are made in - surprise! - the PRC = People's Republic of China. Perhaps the foreman or marketing manager chose them so that patriotic messages could be easily written with this tool. "LOLS" is difficult but Xian, Qi and Zhu are much easier. Bloboprev on letter freq.

Here's the scatterplot of the 26 letter freqs in the OxEngDict compared to PplRepChina as represented in the archives of Art Studio and The Range. The letters appear chosen to be completely unrelated to their frequency in English. So The Range, a British firm headquartered in Plymouth, are not serving anglophone literacy with this particular toy.


No comments:

Post a Comment