And one story that always kind of captures my imagination.

The street's lost culture.

And you're listening to Kearning cultures.

Kurning cultures.

Hi, Dana here.

We're taking a break this week while we work on our next few episodes.

So in the meantime, we wanted to revisit an old favorite.

This story comes to us from producer Jad Khalil, who takes it from here.

You know that thing when somebody tells you not to think about an elephant?

So you think about an elephant?

It's kind of the same thing with reading a word. It's pretty much impossible to look at a word

you know and not read it. We read thousands of words every day, much of it without actually trying

to read them. There are the billboards and storefronts to read when we drive by without

thinking. We read novels and books

with purpose. And then there's the words on screens that hold our attention for hours a day.

Get ready for another wild news cycle. Most of us don't really think about how those words came to us,

how they were designed, or who designed them. They just exist and we read them. But Nasri Khatar obsessed

over words. Oh, absolutely. His favorite thing was to read the dictionary, believe it or not.

This is Nasri Qatar's daughter, Camille Khatar. He had a dictionary next to his bed, and he would

look up words and try to remember them and use them.

He was a Lebanese American architect, and he had this subtle but big idea to change the way we read Arabic.

It became his lifelong obsession.

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