Silent Reading
Silent Reading
The principle innovation that made silent reading possible in the Middle Ages was the insertion of spaces between words. The addition of word spacing enabled readers to group words into meaningful units, to skim texts, to locate specific passages of interest, and to predict what would come next. The use of upper and lower case letters and punctuation are clues to grammatical and semantic relationships, which made it easier for readers to infer syntactic and discourse-level structures, further encouraged the move toward silent,nonlinear reading
Ginny was the perkiest girl to come by in months. Her short pixie hair, plaid pleated skirt and penny loafers aroused my curiosity and sense of adventure. She looked good and had all the necessary prerequisites for my Summer Girl Program: sparkling eyes, well proportioned stats and a telling intelligence. It was April of some year in the 60s and I had begun switching from the Winter Girl Program to the upcoming season. Rarely were winter girls able to mutate into the summer category. They had put on winter weight, were frequently fair skinned and, more often than not, had lost the battle to cellulite. Summer girls had to tan well, look good in a bathing suit and be athletically inclined: swim laps in under thirty seconds and surf the ocean's tallest waves without squealing.
Initially my thoughts were that this was someone I could show off at the beach. We were real sexists back then in the early 60s. You went with a girl, in part, because of how she reflected on you. You never took a "dog" out publically; it would not be good for your image. Image mattered. Ginny was different and, because of her, I learned the real meaning of love and the pain of rejection.
