Talk:1133: Up Goer Five
This comic is also a celebration of what many people, presumably including former NASA employee Randall, consider the greatest technological achievement ever. -- 158.169.131.14 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
I'm surprised "ship" isn't among the most commonly used words in English. Where do these statistics come from? Davidy22(talk) 12:35, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
- It makes sense that "capsule" and "spaceship" (as one word) are not in the "ten hundred" most-common words (Really, "thousand" isn't on this list either?), but not "fuel" and/or "tank"? People (context: US Midwesterner) talk about filling up their cars all the time! I'd like to see the original 1,000-word list. (Also: "Up Goer"? Well, it goes up -- that's about ALL it does. Makes sense, I guess.) --BigMal27 // 192.136.15.149 13:13, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
Maybe is Randall referring to Simplified Technical English? — Ethaniel (talk) 14:09, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
- There is an entry in the Simple English Wikipedia: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_English . The Simple English Wikipedia is interesting to browse, and challenging to write articles for. J-beda (talk) 14:24, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
I'm inclined to think this is also a nod to 1984's Newspeak, and the dumbing-down effect of an overly controlled language. It's good to simplify (linguistic) complexity, but with that simplification of text comes a simplification of capacity, too. We push back horizons by exploring unknowns, so restricting things to a small set of knowns may be counterproductive. -- IronyChef (talk) 15:13, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
- This is the very point I am trying to make time and again. Some topics cannot be correctly explained to everyone. BTW XKCD #547 had a similar point.
The comic is almost certainly using http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_list or another work list like it.82.16.27.115 16:58, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
The phrase in the explanation "Helium is much less prone to catching fire" brought a smile to my lips as there is literally <SIC> nothing less prone to catching fire than Helium. 90.208.12.4 23:10, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
