April Fooling It

Guess tomorrow the National Post will print a little ha! fooled ya! Today, front page, below the fold was the article that David Stover, president of Oxford University Press Canada felt it was due time to change the English alphabet and withdraw a few unneeded letters. After due consideration it was thought appropriate to extinguish the more arcane, little-used and truly nuisance letters such as Q, U, M and W.

Who needs them anyway? My name, for example, doesn't use even one of them. Of course if that turns out to be successful they may consider deeper cuts, ridding our language of several more alphabet letters. C and X, for example, have been bandied about as being quite unnecessary for common usage. We'd be better off without them all. Let's see, that would leave us with either 22 letters, or if, the latter two were included, 20 to make do with.

Who needs all those redundancies anyway? If we're smart enough and improvisational, as we most certainly are, we can easily compensate for what we're leaving out. It'll be confusing at first, most certainly, but we'd get used to it. Think about the spelling lapses, and the letters somehow gone mysteriously missing with teens' text-messaging. And they know what they mean, don't they?

So we'll all go the way of least resistance, teens leading the way, and the Oxford shouting encouragement. In the greater interests of efficiency. Our message will become less complex, more to the point, fundamentally concise; brevity the order of the day. Yoo thnk im kidng? We won't be language-impoverished, we'll be language-challenged, and that's always a good thing, isn't it?

We need some cerebral puzzlers; too many of us have a habit of misplacing our thinking apparatus; a paucity of letters will get us going again. At least until next April, when we can trick ourselves into reversing the entire debacle.