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The worst thing about QWERTY


 I've never involved myself in debates about the QWERTY keyboard versus alternatives.

I will say, though, that it would be better to have "t" further away from "w".  On a different line, maybe? 

This arrangement makes the typing of "not" for "now" or vice versa all too easy, I'm guessing that is the reason that Thomas Paine wrote "Now is the time for all good men...." In a first draft he surely wrote "It is now the time..." only to start worrying that some middleman would turn that accidentally into "It is not the time." 

"Not is the time for all good men..." seems more nonsensical than "It is not the time"  so the latter would be more likely to survive as a typo than the former.

And of course the now/not reversal is worse than nonsensical.  It produces a sensible sentence with a meaning exactly the opposite of what is intended. 

   

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  1. HenryOctober 7, 2025 at 7:57 AM

    "w" and "t" have two letters between them, which seems sufficient to me. Anyway, if Paine changed "It is now the time" to "Now is the time," it might have been because he realized that the latter constitutes better writing. Starting with, and therefore emphasizing "Now," is more powerful that starting with "It." Also, starting with "It is" adds a superfluous word: "It," so we have five words instead of four. "It is" should be avoided, just as "There is" (and other forms of "is," such as "are" and "were") should be avoided. Don't write, "There are ten people in the room." Write, "Ten people are in the room."

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