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Phrase: At your fingertips
Remember the days of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica?
People thought that if they had a set of encyclopedias in their house, they would have the knowledge of the world at their fingertips.
My family had three sets in total.
I used to read them for pleasure and to pass the time on wet winter days.
Knowledge took up more space back then and weighed a whole lot more.
During my childhood, my family moved three times.
Each time we moved, I was responsible for packing up all the books we had.
I remember their weight.
Even before the Internet came to be, I had the world at my fingertips.
Of course, we had the encyclopedias.
Then there was a set of New and Old Testaments illustrated for children.
I also remember shelves and shelves of leatherbound editions of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
In addition to all of those, there were the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables, Charles Dickens’ Complete Works and a plethora of others.
My house was a veritable library.
Every day of my childhood, I had the knowledge of the natural and human worlds at my fingertips.
Those were the days before the Internet and video games.
Many people have War and Peace on their bucket lists.
It’s something they think they should accomplish before they die.
War and Peace was a book I read when I was 14 years old.
It’s a giant book.
My copy broke in half as I was reading it.
We had to put rubber bands around it to put it back on the shelf.
These days, with two Kindles, a smartphone, and a computer, I can read anything I want whenever I want.
Project Gutenberg puts thousands of old books at my fingertips whenever I feel like reading.
Believe it or not, I still purchase hard-copy books.
Right now, I’m rereading the Harry Potter series.
To play with words, that’s another post in the books.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 77.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.