Theo Sanderson has made a text editor that checks if a body of text complies with using only the 1,000 most common English words. This was inspired by XKCD’s “Up-Goer Five” — a description of the Saturn V rocket created according to this rule. It reads like a Simple Wikipedia article (but even more extreme).
Anyway, I’ve seen a couple friends describe their job using this constraint, so I figured I’d try my hand at it. It’s surprisingly intelligible, and I think I like the kenning of “body-book” to describe a genome.
Children often have bodies like their parents. One reason this is true is because we each have parts that tell our bodies how to grow. We get these parts from our parents, and they can be read like a book. I study these body-books.
Some body-books have words that cause people to grow in the same way. But sometimes people are different — even if their body-books have the same words — and so I also study what things make bodies different even if their body-books are the same.
We are able to study our body-books more than ever, because we can now read them very easily.
Another important thing about body-books: we think it will be possible to learn a lot from someone’s body-book, even if we aren’t able to do it now. Also, with computers it’s very easy to share body-books — and it’s very hard to hide them after they’re shared. This means if people give their body-books so others can study them, they might share things they didn’t know about and didn’t mean to share.
So another part of my job is making sure people learn this might happen. We want to share body-books with everyone so that everyone can study them, but only people who know the fears should share their body-books.