Hornbooks and Battledores

Hornbooks and battledores were two early literacy teaching aids. A hornbook was a primer for children, use from the 15th to the 18th century, consisting of a sheet of paper (or parchment) mounted on a thin wooden paddle, usually with a handle that was perforated so that the hornbook could be hung at the child’s girdle, or belt. The sheet usually had the alphabet, some pairs of letters, and a religious verse, often the Lord's Prayer. Because paper was so expensive, parents and teachers wanted to protect it. So they covered the paper with a very thin piece of cow's horn which was so thin, you could see right through it. Thus, the name, hornbook came to be used to describe this type of “book.”

Not all hornbooks were the same. Many were made out of metal, sometimes even silver. Others had the alphabet carved into paddles made of ivory (photo above). One special kind of hornbook was made out of gingerbread. As children learned each letter of the alphabet, they were rewarded with letters to eat.

Once the price of paper became cheap, companies started to make battledores. Battledores was an early form of badminton played with a flat wooden paddle and a shuttlecock. The paddle was probably similar in shape/size to hornbooks, thus, the word probably seemed appropriate as the name for the new book form which derived from them. Popular in the 1800's, battledores were made of thin cardboard. Although some battledores were made in the shape of a hornbook, the card was usually cut into the shape of a rectangle and then folded in
thirds.

The content of a battledore was similar to that of a hornbook, including the alphabet in both capital and small letters and pairs of letters as a phonics lesson. But, unlike the hornbook, battledores frequently had a mixed-up alphabet with the letters out of order as a way to help children distinguish individual letters. They also had lists of short words and sometimes included a prayer, but normally they had a short story or fable instead. With a greater surface area, battledores could contain illustrations. These were generally pictures of everyday life that would have been familiar to children of the time.

Typoglycemia

Typoglycemia is the lighthearted name given to a purported recent discovery about the cognitive processes behind reading written text. The name makes little sense as glycemia is the concentration of glucose in the blood. It is an urban legend/Internet meme that does have some element of truth behind it.

The legend is propagated by email and message boards and demonstrates that readers can understand the meaning of words in a sentence even when the letters of each word are scrambled. As long as all the necessary letters are present, and the first and last letters remain the same, readers turn out to have little trouble reading the text.

The phenomenon is illustrated by this widely-forwarded e-mail message:

I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rsceearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Such a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed Typoglycemia.

Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was ipmorantt.

In actual fact, no such research was carried out at Cambridge University. It all started with a letter to the New Scientist magazine from Graham Rawlinson in which he discusses his Ph.D. thesis.

While typoglycemic writing may be easy to understand, creating it is slow going. Consequently, a typoglycemia translator has been created to hlep you wtrie yuor own tmylyieogpcc msegesas or gaert Aermcian nveol.

The major part of this posting was taken from the Wikipedia article “Typoglycemia” under the GNU Free Documentation License.