Recurring Characters

[grip at netcom.com]

On Thu, 22 Feb 1996, Mikko Keskinen wrote:

> And the next question in the _Trivial Pynchon Pursuit_ is, "How many 
> characters recur in all of Pynchon oeuvre, including blurbs, prefaces, 
> and liner notes?" The right answer is 26.  That is, the number of letters in 
> the English alphabet.

Ah but this is not nearly enough characters! One must and does 
distinguish between upper and lower case characters. "bob" may be a verb, 
but Bob is a noun. And don't forget those other fun characters, 
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and all the strange characters such as 
!@#$%^&*()_[]{}'/.,,;:"? which add (or subtract) meaning to the 26 
fundamental characters. And last the null character without which our 
sentenceswouldstarttolooklikethis!ImaginereadingGRifitwaswrittenlikethis.

grip