Coco Gauff and missing ligatures

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

Today I read the headline: Coco Gauff Loses Australian Open Seminal!

Well, I tell a half-truth. I did indeed read the headline as 'seminal', but
a second reading told me that the headline really said 'semifinal'.

This set me thinking. In the old days copy and paste from PDF would omit
ligatures. So 'semifinal' would become 'seminal' (if we ignore any spaces).

Here's a puzzle. Find more words that remain a word when the ligatures are
deleted. And find sentences that have an interesting change of meaning when
ligatures are deleted. This is a sort of typographic variant of the more
common palindrome.

And by the way, at the final of US Open last year Gauff beat Sabenka. And
at the Australian Open this year Sabalenka beat Gauff. So in some sense for
both players it was, drum roll, a SEMINAL SEMIFINAL.

Finally, many thanks to all who saved the FI from the perils of
copy-and-paste. Also by the way, I've read on a T-shirt that there's a
preservation society for the Oxford Comma, also known as the serial comma.

with kind regards

Jonathan
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