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Ann Althouse says: "I'm fascinated by the almost legible. Have you ever imagined there were words somewhere that you could almost read?" She offers this intriguing illustration. This sign has more distinct letters but is equally illegible. "A sky full of stars arranged itself in an unreadable tombstone motto." —Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever. Speaking of epitaphs in the sky, the Orion Correlation Theory proposes a relationship between the Egyptian pyramids of Giza and the alignment of stars in the Orion constellation. Here's a big graphic depicting the correlation.
More mundane but equally mysterious, here's an unreadable funeral marker inside a rock-lined grave in Texas. "In places the ink was faded, the script unreadable. It appeared to be a poem." —Kelly Jones, The Seventh UnicornHere's an unreadable 18-line poem, scrawled by Mark W. "He was writing tiny, illegible doodles on big sheets of paper years before anyone else." —Edmund White, My LivesHere's an unreadable page of doodles, with text from an off-world language. "Concrete poems are often close to graphic art and may be unreadable in a conventional way." —Stephen Matterson and Darryl Jones, Studying PoetryHere's unreadable text art, by a program that encodes text as binary and represents the resulting code visually.
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Wilfred Funk once collected a list of "the most beautiful words in
English." The list includes such words as dawn, tranquil, hush, golden,
halcyon, camellia, myrrh, jonquil, lullaby, and melody. Pictured below
are four more words from Funk's list. Can you guess them?
The answer: Top left: TENDRIL. Top right: ANEMONE. Bottom left: FAWN. Bottom right: CHALICE. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
There are lots more lists of beautiful (and not so beautiful) English words at A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia.
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While referencing my computer's built in dictionary, I encountered a bit of editorializing that I enjoyed:
The spelling baited breath instead of bated breath is a common mistake that, in addition to perpetuating a
cliché, evokes a distasteful image.
A distasteful image was indeed evoked, and it inspired what I believe is my first-ever limerick (unless I wrote any as a child).
The fisherman's breath was bated;
On thin ice had he skated.
The cause of concern:
a perm (not a worm).
His wife said she'd have his ass crated.
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Spammers from Oz
Ken Clinger
shared the following text about magic spectacles that reveal a person's
character by illuminating letters of the alphabet on the
forehead. Ken found this text in a spam message:
Will you please wear these spectacles
for a few moments? The king at once put them on. They are called
Character Markers, continued the boy, because the lenses catch and
concentrate the character vibrations radiating from every human
individual and reflect the true character of the person upon his
forehead. If a letter 'G' appears, you may be sure his
disposition is good; if his forehead is marked with an 'E' his
character is evil, and you must beware of treachery.
The passage is actually from something entitled:
The Master Key
An Electrical Fairy Tale
Founded Upon The Mysteries Of Electricity
And The Optimism Of Its Devotees. It Was
Written For Boys, But Others May Read It
by [noneother than] L. Frank Baum
The story is available for online reading here. |
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Forgot the alphabet, — my language's Greek to me!
— Vladimir Vysotsky, "About a Mental Clinic" (translated by Andrey Kneller) |
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"All the thoughts are swirling about in a bowl of Cheerios,
spelling millions of one letter words with no punctuation to speak of ..."
—Max, from his MySpace blog. |
Page 73 of 75
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Original Content Copyright © 2026 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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