My job is to write stories about interesting people and things. I phone people and meet them and write down what they say. I turn these words into a story – something with a beginning, middle and an end – and try to make it accurate truthful* true and interesting. Then my story becomes the news and people read it.
Today I have to write about The Up-Goer Five, a clever smart fun internet web online device invention thing you can find on a computer. It asks that you explain a difficult hard idea only using the thousand ten hundred most common used words.
Its name comes from an attempt to explain Nasa's Saturn V rocket a machine a car that drives into space using these few words.
Scientists People with big brains have been using it to explain their jobs on the computer.
But it has also created led to some surprising and beautiful poetry words. One person who works with words said Saturn a planet world was like this: "There is a world that goes around the sun, ten times farther away from the sun than the world we live on. This world is really big – about ten times as wide as our world – and most of it is thick air pulled tight together. It has big beautiful rings around it, made of many pieces of ice."
Every person who uses jargon annoying words – from civil servants important people to management consultants rich silly bossy powerful people with confusing jobs – should try it.
I wonder if people will use it to write books for children.
Have a go yourself here. You can share the results in the comments below.
* Whoops, I have used some banned words – outside the most-used thousand, according to the UpGoerFive tool devised by Cambridge parasitologist and web developer Theo Sanderson
