Is this a major lacuna in my education, or are others just as confused as I am? To find out, I have created an alphabetization test. I collected the following ten entries from my phone book, presented here in random order. Every entry appears exactly as it did in the phone book, including all spaces and punctuation (or lack thereof). Your assignment, should you choose to take it: place them in the order they appeared in the phone book, first to last.
A & O Liquor StoreI'm offering a prize (as yet unselected, value less than $20) for the first person to give me the correct answer, in the comments or by email. Limit: 3 entries per person, one at a time. You can even cheat by using the phone book (but I won't tell you which one I used). I'll reveal the correct answer if I haven't heard it in one week.
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
AA Auto Body
A 4 V Audio
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A & A Automotive
A Two Girl Experience
A & F Auto Supply
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
Incidentally, I have developed a hypothesis about the alphabetization scheme, but I won't let on just yet. I'll post an update or comment later.
UPDATE: D'oh. The final entry in the list should be A & A Auto Performance Inc., not A & Auto Peformance Inc. I've corrected it now. But even ignoring that entry, all of people's guesses thus far have been incorrect.
8 comments:
Kissmesoftly -- wrong! Try again!
Joel -- sounds like a reasonable convention, but (given that kissmesoftly's answer was wrong) apparently not the convention used by the phone book.
In my phone book, space sorts before any printing character, ampersand (and its surrounding spaces) is a null, and numbers are treated as if spelled out.
I get
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A 4 V Audio
A Two Girl Experience
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
AA Auto Body
A & A Automotive
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
The harder alphabetization test I saw once was for books in a library, and it included Victor Hugo's novel 1793, which had to be sorted by the french colloquial spelling of the year 1793. (We don't say "one thousand seven hundred ninety three" when pronouncing year names, and neither do they.)
Chris -- wrong, but that's the closest anyone's come so far.
In addition to the comments, I've gotten four incorrect guesses by email.
Sorry, all answers given so far are wrong (even if I ignore the placement of A & A Auto Performanc Inc. because of the error in the original post).
Z suggested reading "A 2 Z" as "A to Z". I like that suggestion, but if it's true, then the phone company could have converted it to "A-Z", and my book treats the dash as a null like the ampersand. That gives
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A 4 V Audio
A Two Girl Experience
AA Auto Body
A & A Automotive
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
Still no correct guesses!
Sorry, still no correct guesses!
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