S is for The Almighty Schwa, and Stuff.
One would think that an alphabet of 26 letters is quite enough, thankyou very much. And it may well be. But.. some would have it that we need another Vowel. A, E, I, O, and U just don’t cut it any more. Not in the Modern World. They may have a case. There is an argument for Y being a sometime vowel: The Happy Hippy gives a Y an “ee” sound. The word Why gives Y a, well, a why sound. I would like everyone to take note of this symbol: ə. It’s a SCHWA. Pronounce it as you will. It doesn’t mind. It is, after all, the Almighty Schwa. And it's pretty cruisy. Relaxed. Lazy, really. It describes that funny little "uh" sound that all the vowels make occasionally. Look at the Hypocritical Hippopotamus. Using the Schwa, this would be spelled as H ə p ə critical H ip ə pot ə m ə s . Miserly would be Mis ə rly . The Schwa is that interesting little strangled “uh” sound that most written vowels often make. Perhaps Noah Webster was right in popularizing the so-called Amer