26 Letters

  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

  R is also for Ravish and Radish:  Two words, both alike in dignity, In fair Maungatapu where we lay our scene…   But enough of that English scribbler’s maunderings. Enough, I say. For it is a cold day in Maungatapu. Even the sparrows are producing tiny puffs of steam as they breath: vapour trails at two meters. The cat hasn’t moved for three days, and the tui are avoiding the bird bath. They may be concerned about bouncing off. It’s just not the weather to be considering a Revolution, yet we must. The Listener is sitting on our table, and the first few pages of Letters, Editorial, and Jane Clifton mention something about the Government’s Three Waters scheme. (Do you remember when the word “scheme” simply meant plan? But now “scheme seems to have taken on sinister overtones..) It strikes me that there’s a few important points that the Powers That Be and The Commentators Who Commentate have all missed: water falls from the sky. And every house has a large water-catching dev

     It’s an upstart! That’s what it is. It’s just an “O” with a tail, yet it’s oh so high-faluting. Just because it’s a letter and a homonym. Now you and I know that a homonym isn’t a creature in some fantasy by J Swift. And so does a common-or-garden Q. Would a Q queue? Not likely. The long-tailed O is too fecking arty-farty for that. Try to imagine it: a queue of Qs waiting for the 732 to Woking-on-Rhyme.  Nah. Yet it’s today’s letter, so I’ll treat it with a little respect. Without the Q we wouldn’t have the fine word Question. Or we'd have to spell it Kwestion, which is out of the question.  And without question we wouldn’t be able to tell our neighbours, our children, our grandchildren, and sweet old Mr Murphy down the road who mows everyone’s berm to QUESTION everything. Especially everything that’s on the internet. It’s a great shame, but the internet – which started out as something so promising – has been broken so soon. We all thought – no, we didn’t. We fool

Let’s look at Petrol, Pornography, Privacy, Patriarchy, and Pam.   P is the perfect letter to use when you’re considering writing an unfavourable review of, say, a book: perhaps one written by me, in which case you could start with the snide observation that it was unfinished. But then – the plenitude of P words you could use! Nouns, adjectives, and adverbs! There’s a profound plethora of them. Pusillanimous, parsimonious, unPrincipled, poisonous, prancing pony, puking, portly, pornographic, peacockery, a paucity of personality, puerile, porky, pathetic, paltry, ponderous, pendulously-paunched, prurient, and pitifully-pickled. Perhaps even Pantone-painted, if you were desperate. Petrol : It’s useful stuff. It would be even more useful if the common internal combustion engine were more than 10% (and I think I’m being generous) efficient. 10% of the energy created when petrol in burned in a piston is converted to forward motion. The rest is heat. Which requires cooling s