Stephen Fry, in a new show on language, puts QWERTY on trial, asking was it designed to deliberately slow typing down?
QWERTY takes between 60 and 80 hours to actually get to 60 words per minute. And it actually has an 80% failure rate. Now a pilot’s license only takes about 45 hours to get and has an 80% success rate. It’s easier to learn to fly a plane than it is to actually use a QWERTY keyboard.
In a conversation with a 14-year old interviewer that ranged from Harry Potter to darts, Fry said:
I haven’t seen a good documentary about language, where it comes from, how we speak it, the variations of it, whether languages are dying, whether we are better at speaking than we were. There are so many questions.
As for what’s to come:
See also:
The Truth of Qwerty and Why do we all use Querty keyboards?
I’m going to Beijing to interview the man who invented Pinyin, a phonetic version of the Chinese language. He’s 105 years old … if he dies on me I’m going to be so annoyed.
Let’s hope for the best. Coming from someone whose college application essay was an ode to my favorite words, I’ll tune in again.
