Thing Explainer
May 16, 2015 4:43 PM   Subscribe

Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) is writing a new book. This book will be like his great Up Goer Five where he showed lots of parts of the space car people used to go to another world and wrote about them using only the ten hundred most used words.
posted by HillbillyInBC (7 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Aw, sorry, I love Up-Goer Five and I'm beyond excited for this book, but just the announcement that there will be a book isn't quite enough for a MeFi post. A post needs to have something for folks to read or look at on the web. Maybe when the book comes out he'll have sample pages to link to, and this could be a post then? -- LobsterMitten



 
I don't get what this book is about. Could you put it in layman's terms for me?
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:46 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I always thought Up Goer Five was a pretty brilliant concept and I enjoy the weird cadence using only the top one thousand words brings. It's sort of the quantitative version of "Explain like I'm Five"'s qualitative approach.

In general I'm not in favor of blogs turned books (even though I'm a big fan of What If I was never tempted to buy the book version) but this one in particular seriously tempts me.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:48 PM on May 16, 2015


The most amusing thing to me about Up Goer Five was that the word thousand is not itself among the thousand most common English words.
posted by localroger at 4:48 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


where he showed lots of parts of the space car people used to go to another world and wrote about them using only the ten hundred most used words.

Is the relative pronoun "that" not on the list? This sentence had me wondering what "car people" are doing, and when they used to go to other worlds.....
posted by thelonius at 4:52 PM on May 16, 2015


Oh, and while thouand isn't one of the ten hundred most common words, computer is.
posted by localroger at 4:53 PM on May 16, 2015


If you want to play the home game here is where you start.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:55 PM on May 16, 2015


Thelonius: Just a grammatical misstep on my part is all. I was so wrapped up in making it conform that I didn't catch the omission.
posted by HillbillyInBC at 4:56 PM on May 16, 2015


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