h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you haven't already, it sounds like you should read The Wonderful O by James Thurber. In the UK, it ships as a double edition with The 13 Clocks (which is probably a better story). Anyway, here is the synopsis from amazon.com:

"The delightful tale features two pirate adventurers, Black and Littlejack, who sail to the island of Ooroo in search of treasure. Upon their arrival, Black bans anything and everything to do with the letter "O," and the people of the newly renamed island of R must try to live in utter chas and cnfusin."

Awesme.... even wnderful

No doubt I'm teaching Granny to suck eggs here. but...
Georges Perec wrote a book called A Void, in French, which does not contain a single 'e'. Gilbert Adair translated the whole of it into English while still not using 'e'. I read the first page recently as an extract. It works very well indeed.

If we can manage without 'e' then we can surely manage without lots of other letters and still get our point across. One could create a sort of Newspeak alphabet, as it were, continually shrinking as it became more mature. Now that would be a magnificent achievement in cultural economy.

FM

This reminds me of this wonderful (r wnderful) old joke which a friend mailed to me last week:


The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which is the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza.

Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

This looks like an adaptation of the piece Mark Twain wrote.

http://metrologyforum.tm.agilent.com/fun4.shtml

Just goes to show: there are no new jokes!

Old jokes never die, they just go round and round the internet.

I think it was Geroge Bernard Shaw who said that according to English spelling conventions, one could get away with 'ghoti' for 'fish': 'gh' as in 'enough', 'o' as in 'women' and 'ti' as in 'condition'. Talk about from one extreme to the other....