There was the following passage in New York Time’s (May 17) article describing the scene of Sandy Bem, a Cornell psychology professor getting diagnosis of whether she has the sign of Alzheimer’s or not by a neuropsychologist. She chose euthanasia to confront the progressive decay of her self-identity due to Alzheimer’s in the end:
“He (doctor) read her a list of words and had her recall as many as
she could. He gave her two numbers and two letters and asked her to
rearrange them in a particular order: low letter, high letter, low
number, high number.”
– The New York Times
I know lower case letters and upper case letters, but I’ve never heard of ‘low letter’ and ‘high letter.’
I searched the meanings of ‘low letter’ and ‘high letter’ on Google, but found no source telling the definition. What do they mean?
Best Answer
A low letter would be toward the beginning of the alphabet (a, b, c) and a high letter would be toward the end (x, y, z). So by this measure a is less than b, e is less than o, and y is less than z.
It is worth noting that, in computing, the characters of the alphabet are assigned numerical values that sort from low to high, corresponding to each letter's rank within the alphabet (upper- and lower-case letters follow the same ordering, but are located at different ranges within the continuum, and "special" characters fall outside these ranges altogether).