The Silent Q’s
May 09
Posted: under General.
Have you ever looked at the letter q and wondered what it’s good for? In English, it doesn’t really do anything unless it’s accompanied by the letter u immediately following it. The q is therefore silent without it’s companion.
It’s a little known fact that in the English language there are actually silent q’s all over the place. These of course don’t do anything but make words longer, so for convenience they were omitted from the written word hundreds of years ago. This is a fact that I (or perhaps one of my friends) made up discovered in junior high. In a way, it takes something away (mainly, q’s) from the language without the silent q’s.
In the past, expansion of words had to be done by hand and was therefore a tedious and laborious process. Now, for the first time ever, this process has been automated. Finally, you can reclaim the lost glory of the written word without all the pesky effort!
Ok, so in reality this ingenious idea thought up so many years ago popped into my head the other day for some reason and I thought it would be a good excuse to do a little programming. I actually haven’t done anything along those lines in the past couple of months, so it’s nice to do something at least. The applet is of course stupendously simple and took me virtually no time to write once you remove the time I spent re-learning how applets work and how to deal with swing since I haven’t done either in a couple of years now. It’s totally useless. Can you get better than that? I have another idea for something similar that will be almost as useless but not really.
