Cubicle Craziness Episode 1

I sometimes think of crazy ideas as a coping mechanism for 8 hours in the Great Beige Monster.

One of which was inspired by my haphazard attempts to learn Hindi.

Hindi has a remarkable degree of organization – one of my study texts has the consonants in a 5x5 grid. English, of course, has 26 letters, including vowels, but the thought occurred to me that a 5x5 grid might make sense. Who knows, maybe ridding ourselves of a letter could reduce typesetting costs. So the question becomes, which letter gets the boot?

Generally, English consonants have one sound and vowels two. More importantly, most of the consonants have a distinct sound with little overlap, but a few that have multiple sounds also share them with another consonants. The following letters make the best candidates for ejection, or at least reclassification as a symbol.

C – This letter comes to mind first, if for no other reason that its’ position. Most of the time, it imitates a K or an S.

Pro – we can start spelling “cat” as “kat”, “typical” as “typikal”, “America” as “Amerika”, and so on.

Con – confusion will reign as “scent” becomes “sent” – even though we’re used to assigning multiple meanings (and sometimes pronunciations) to a single word. A tougher nut we will encounter in most “ch” words, such as “church” (I suggest “kurk”, close to the Dutch form), but words such as “itch” (“itsh”?). OTOH, making “Chronic” into “Kronik” might save this choice. Then again, changing “the ABCs” into the “ABDs” might cause widespread angst.

Q – This letter has wreaked havoc with the language for some time. Most of the time, it joins itself to the letter U (“queer”), and the construction “qu” could be easily replaced by “kw”

Pro – Imagine all the fun you’ll have writing “kween”, “kweer”, and “kwality”.

Con – For some reason, has a high symbolic value in various fields as diverse as physics and entertainment. And you’ll piss off all of those Scrabble freaks who know every “Q without U” word.

Y – This letter, a sort of vowel-consonant bastard child, a linguistic Dick Cheney, has an easy substitute for its’ vowel sound (long E – just ask any girl named Sherri, Traci, Vicki, ad infinitum), but the consonant sound we can only approximately replace.

Pro – It would legitimize all of the Sherris of the world.

Con – The closest I can come to “yankee” is “jankee”, and that does not sound so good. And we might have to replace “yes” altogether (“si”?)

X – One of my favorite letters, it has no unique sound – it always imitiates “ks” or “z”, but it carries massive symbolism.

Pro – “eks-wife”, “seks”, “ekskrement”, “foks”

Con – Used for other things besides words, it pulls the symbolic weight of a whole generation. Also applied to prohibition, wrong answers, powers of magnification, the Roman numeral for ten, and so on.

Final Call – demote X to a symbol. Hey, Pluto got demoted. And we can change “XYZ” to “WYZ” – watch your zipper.