Paper checks and cash are being replaced by credit and debit cards and bank/online payments. (The headline is excessive: checks are not dead… yet.)
Back then (2000), 6 out of every 10 noncash purchases, gifts and paid bills were handled with checks. A mere two decades later, just 1 in 20 are. ((My bolding))
Who still uses checks and cash? Older people. Contractors and charities receive more than a third of their receipts as checks. More whites than non-whites (who are less likely to have checking accounts, or to be refused credit). Rural dwellers; people with bachelor’s or advanced degrees.
You’ve probably heard of the international language Esperanto. About two million people speak it! And you can learn Esperanto around four times faster than other languages! To demonstrate this, here’s how nouns work in Esperanto. Other grammar rules will be similarly simple.
Let’s start with a quick grammar review. Nouns are words for people, places, ideas, and things. For example, dog, ocean, tree, country, goose, sheep are nouns.
In Esperanto, every noun ends with the letter o: dog, ocean, tree, country, goose, sheep become hundo, oceano, arbo, lando, ansero, ŝafo (pronounced “shah-foh”). Period.
In English, we make a noun plural by adding an s to the word: dogs, oceans, trees. Except words ending in y have the y changed to ies (country/countries). Except if the letter before the y is a vowel (boy/boys). Except for goose: the plural is geese. And one sheep two sheep. And there are more exceptions, like words borrowed from other languages.
To make Esperanto nouns plural, you just add a j (pronounced like an English “y”): hundoj, oceanoj, arboj, landoj, anseroj, ŝafoj (pronounced “shah-foy”). Always. No exceptions. End of rules for plurals.
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Also, in an English sentence, you know who is doing the action (the subject) and who it is getting done to (the object) from the order of the words:
The dog chases the cat.
The dog is chasing, the cat is getting chased. You know that because the dog is before the verb and the cat is after the verb. (Obviously it gets complicated quickly, but that’s the basic rule.)
An Esperanto sentence shows who the action is getting done to (the object) with an extra ending, the letter n. So these sentences mean exactly the same thing: The dog chases the cat:
La hundo ĉasas la katon. The dog chases the cat. La katon ĉasas la hundo. The dog chases the cat. Ĉasas la hundo la katon. The dog chases the cat. La katon la hundo ĉasas. (Ktp.) The dog chases the cat. (Etc.)
(Note: hundo is similar to the English word “hound.” ĉ is like English ch, so “chah-sahss.”)
In all of those sentences, we know that the cat is getting chased, because katon ends with the n object ending.
This is useful for people from languages where the word order is different from English, or which also mark the nouns: they can use their usual word order and all Esperantists will understand them. In practice, many Esperantists use the English word order (with the correct endings!) anyway.
But… what happens if your word is both plural and an object? Easy! You just add both the jand the n so the noun ends with –ojn (rhymes with JOIN). The dogs chase the cats:
La hundoj ĉasas la katojn. The dogs chase the cats. La katojn ĉasas la hundoj. The dogs chase the cats. Ĉasas la hundoj la katojn. The dogs chase the cats. La katojn la hundoj ĉasas. (Ktp.) The dogs chase the cats. (Etc.)
So:
Singular
Plural
Subject
-O (“oh”)
-OJ (“oy”)
Object
-ON (“own”)
-OJN (“oyn”)
(Note that, in English, the verb has to change from “chases” to “chase” when we have plural dogs. It’s almost like we’re moving the “s” from the verb to the subject! In Esperanto, the verb stays exactly the same.)
And, unlike French, Spanish, German, or Italian (but like English), nouns don’t have a gender. One less thing to memorize for every noun.
That’s nouns in Esperanto. That’s everything. Enjoy!
Hmmm… maybe we can sneak adjectives in here too: words that modify nouns (big, hungry, gray). In English, these do not change for number or use, they’re always the same (one big hungry gray dog or six big hungry gray dogs). In Esperanto, adjectives work just like nouns except using a instead of o for the endings (‑a, ‑an, ‑aj, ‑ajn, pronounced “‑ah”, “‑ahn”, “-eye”, “‑ine”). And they have to match their nouns: La grandaj hundoj ĉasas la grizajn katojn. And you can put them after their nouns, but like English, they’re usually before. La fino (the end)!
As a font fan (or fanatic), I was pleased to see this article on a major news site.
You make font choices every day. You pick type designs each time you use a word processor, read an e-book, send an email, prepare a presentation, craft a wedding invite and make an Instagram story.
It might seem like just a question of style, but research reveals fonts can dramatically shape what you communicate and how you read.
Fonts are “the clothes that words wear,” said early 20th-century editor Beatrice Warde. They also embody style, emotion and authority. Like a villain’s costume in a movie, they quietly tell part of the story.
And you can display the whole article in any of these fonts:
The article also discusses how readability is affected by serif versus sans-serif, contrast and proportion, x-height etc.
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