From showing readers the longest words in common usage (22 letters--counterrevolutionaries, deinstitutionalization), to providing readers with a list of words in which all 5 vowels must appear in alphabetical order (abstemious, facetious), to discovering the name in an American phone book where the most letters of the alphabet are used without…

Ethnographic "New Literacy Studies" question the idea that literacy as such has any uniform effects, arguing instead that effects of literacy inhere in the social practices that impart it. What change, then, does literacy produce where it arrived from two opposed sets of practices? In Quechua-and Aymara-speaking villages on the high…