ABC Student News: Curious Facts

Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words without Using the Letter "E"

Gadsby: Champion of youth is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized thanks to the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth group he organizes.

The 136-page novel is written as a lipogram and does not include words that contain the letter "e". The novel's 50,110 words don't contain a single "e." In Gadsby's introduction Wright says his primary difficulty was avoiding the "-ed" suffix for past tense verbs. He focused on using verbs that don't take the -ed suffix and constructions with "do" (for instance "did walk" instead of "walked"). Scarcity of word options also drastically limited discussion involving quantity, pronouns, and many common words. Wright was unable to talk about any quantity between six and thirty. Wright used abbreviations on occasion, but only if the full form is similarly lipogrammatic, such as with "Dr.", and "P.S.". Wright "blacked" the E key of the typewriter with string, so as to forbid E-words that might slip in... and many did try to do so. Wright's book inspired other "lipogrammatic" works, including the famous novel A Void, which doesn't use the letter A.

Written by: Camila Vega

ABC Student News: Media Influence

Media Influence

What did magazines all had in common last summer? All of the issues released in May, June or even July had one thing in common. Many of these articles were titled as: The Best Suit for Your Body Type, The Year's Hottest Suits, Create Your Own Suit, Get a thin body in just 10 days – you get the idea right?

In spite of the summer theme, each magazine promotes sunless tanning and safe sun exposure, which is a good thing. The bad thing is? Advertisements and the way, we as teens are influenced by these adverts and these ideas that are being promoted.

Adverts seem to be featuring LOTS of skinny, tall and “perfect girls” nowadays. Other than that, all of the magazines were loaded with fashion and beauty advice, each featured several true life stories from the merely humiliating to the terrifying stories that people tell, then we had the stories from celebrities and their careers, boyfriends/girlfriends, piercings, etc. Last but not least, each had its own section devoted to “boys”. Not FOR boys, you understand, ABOUT boys. How to talk to them, approach them, rate them, understand them, date them, and dump them.

So, basically the porpoise of this is to understand that we are unique people and each day the media is bombarding us with ideas of how love, life, family, relationships and many others should be. What we, as teens should do is try to not be influenced by these ideas firstly because as Irene C.Kassorla once stated, we should “have control of the authorship of our own destiny.  The pen that writes our life story must be held in our own hand”, so next time you read or watch an advert keep in mind that these are just trying to sell ideas, but you are the one who will decide whether to believe it or not

Written by: Ingrid Orellana

ABC Student News: United Nations Celebration

The video above was produced by the IGCA team at ABC and it summarises valuable information on the UN celebration that was held today at school

Posted by: Ingrid Orellana

ABC Student News: Editorial

NOT enough streets for so many holes

Of the five taxes charged into the gasoline of the Salvadorian drivers, one of them is to cover the costs of the FOVIAL, but I think that the citizens have enough arguments to tell that what they told about the money charged for the FOVIAL costs isn’t true, but a mere lie. After all this past raining months and days we can confirm that the streets have had damage and some even started to sink, but the FOVIAL isn’t there when it happens, they only do something when this problems becomes public in the news, then they go and solve the problem.  Many of the streets have suffered damages which are ignored by the FOVIAL completely, but then my question is, if the FOVIAL doesn’t use the money for solving the road network problems, then for what do they use it? Does the FOVIAL even have the money, or is the government using it for something else? If we continue this way in no time we will have to expand the streets to give more space for the holes to expanse! Nearly every street in El Salvador has holes nowadays. Some people say that the FOVIAL has distorted their duty, to reconstruct and improve the road network, they receive 66millions yearly, but some says that that isn’t enough, but I think people wouldn’t care to pay a little more if the FOVIAL REALLY did their job.

Written by: Paola Soundy