Ready Order

In the word ARCHETYPICAL, five letters occupy the same positions as in the alphabet — A is first, C third, E fifth, I ninth, and L twelfth.

In the remarkable sentence A bad egg hit KLM wipers two ways, composed by Ross Eckler, fully 16 of 26 letters occupy their alphabetic positions.

A Sharp Wit

A musical joke, by J.F. Rowbotham, 1908:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ehgDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

… wrote a musical wit to a friend of his, and in these terms conveyed an invitation to dinner. What is the explanation of it? “One, sharp. Beef and cabbage.” His friend, who was not behindhand at a joke, though by no means so witty as his host, replied:–

http://books.google.com/books?id=ehgDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

… which reads off by the same hieroglyphic: “Not a bad feed. Naturally (natural E) I will be in time.”

Rowbotham also offers this rather mean-spirited message for a vain lady:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ehgDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

Dot Bomb

Hijinks is the only common English word with three dotted letters in a row. Among proper nouns, Beijing and Fiji are better known than Australia’s Lake Mijijie, but all three lose out to the Katujjijiit Development Corporation, a property development concern in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.

Can we beat this? A reader tells me that pääjääjiiri is Finnish for “main ice mitre,” and possessiveness contains 18 consecutive dots in Morse code.

But the all-time winner must remain H.L. Mencken, who in 1938 ridiculed the New Deal by filling six columns of the Baltimore Evening Sun with 1 million dots — to represent “the Federal Government’s immense corps of job-holders.”