  It is rare that texts or entire books written in a Controlled Natural
Language (CNL) become very popular, but exactly this has happened with a book
that has been published last year. Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer uses only
the 1'000 most often used words of the English language together with drawn
pictures to explain complicated things such as nuclear reactors, jet engines,
the solar system, and dishwashers. This restricted language is a very
interesting new case for the CNL community. I describe here its place in the
context of existing approaches on Controlled Natural Languages, and I provide a
first analysis from a scientific perspective, covering the word production
rules and word distributions.
