Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO

Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO™ 8 October 2026

10 most common meanings of hit

hit is one of Fast Lane Literacy’s 100 words.

Strike or crash into verb
The car hit a tree.

Affect badly verb
High prices hit families hard.

Reach a level verb
Sales hit a record.

A success noun
The song was a hit.

Strike a place (storm, attack) verb
The storm hit the coast.

A blow or loss noun
Profits took a hit.

Arrive or go to verb
The phone hits stores Friday.

A baseball hit noun
She got two hits.

Press a button verb
Hit send.

Suddenly realize verb
Then it hit me.

10 rare uses of hit that are fun to learn

hit the hay — go to bed
I’m sleepy. Time to hit the hay.

hit the books — study hard
Test tomorrow, so I’ll hit the books.

hit it off — like each other right away
The new kids hit it off.

hit the spot — be just what you wanted
That cocoa hit the spot.

hit the roof — get very angry
Mom hit the roof about the mess.

hit the nail on the head — be exactly right
You hit the nail on the head!

hit upon — find an idea by luck
We hit upon a plan.

hit someone up — ask them for something
He hit me up for five bucks.

“Hit me” (cards) — give me another card
In blackjack, say “hit me.”

hit the road — leave
It’s late. Let’s hit the road.

“I was the teacher and the mom who had been trained in the very practices that would later fail my own child”

Missy Purcell:

I watched a system that was supposed to teach my child to read cling to practices that didn’t teach him to read. I was actually told that the balanced literacy approaches being used in his school were appropriate for children with dyslexia. I have emails from that time explaining that they weren’t going to focus on sounding words out.

I still get emotional thinking about that.

Now I know what my child needed. I know what the research says. And I know how deeply entrenched this methodology has become in our schools.

So standing in the same physical space as Lucy Calkins at a conference devoted to advancing the science of reading was complicated for me.

Related, 14 October 2005: Mark Seidenberg’s Informal Talk on Reading Education: “Whole Language was a massive, uncontrolled experiment, with millions of children as unwitting subjects.”

ASD-STE100

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled natural language developed in the late 1970s (originally as AECMA Simplified English) to help the users of English-language maintenance documentation understand what they read. It was initially applicable to commercial aviation and later became a requirement for defense projects, including land and sea vehicles. As a result, maintenance manuals and technical texts today are mostly written in STE.

Andrej Karpathy:

Writing. Something I’ve had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it’s a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs [are] well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I’ve tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for “80% of the way to ASD-STE100” because the spec is quite stringent.

A sea of 400,000+ English words with one tiny coral dot, drawn to scale, marking Fast Lane Literacy’s 100 words. A magnifying glass enlarges it into a 10 by 10 grid.

Fast Lane Literacy applies the same idea to learning to read: “get in, get out” quickly, using a constrained set of words that include common patterns found throughout English.

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