Marie Taylor, Ink

To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet. G.K. Chesterton

If there is any message to be remembered, any maxim to tattoo on your left bicep, it is “Simplify, simplify, simplify!”  One day as my dog Cassie and I perambulated the park, my eye was caught by the street signs in the neighborhood. They were all named after national parks. There was a Mammoth Way, a Yellowstone Avenue, a Cascades Lane, a Yosemite Street, etc.

That put me in mind of when I called Yosemite “Yo-se-mite” (rhyming with “a little tyke”) and La Jolla and “la jolly.”  Spelling can be very misleading and pronunciation is test for the unwary. That naturally led me to consider the alphabet itself – all those j’s and g’s, h’s and i’s, k’s and q’s, and y’s and i’s.

I pondered if there wasn’t there a little overlapping here. I mean how many words do you use on a regular basis – other than yellow and yesterday – that start with a “y?” I wondered if it was possible that y’s could be eliminated from the alphabet. No, you say, we need y’s for words like pretty and very and oy vey.  I ask you to consider substituting all those y’s for i’s.

Observe the confusion that has accumulated through the years with g’s and j’s. There’s the name George and the words, garage, great and gee whiz; for j’s we have Jack and Janet, juice and jump. Couldn’t we practice a little consonantal conservation and just use g’s for everything. There is also bewilderment when j slides into the i territory; that’s where you find the Johns and Juan and Ians.

That same principle applies to k’s and q’s. How hard would it be to live without q’s? And, if we get rid of the q’s, why do we need u’s? Instead of quack, you’d have kwack; instead of quick, you’d have kwik; queer would be kweer. Was that so hard?  Did you have any trouble understanding any of it?

So, with a little forethought and prudence we can easily take our alphabet down from 26 to say 20 or 22 letters. Our dictionaries wouldn’t be so big and our books would be shorter. We’d use less paper which would save the trees which would put more oxygen in the air and repair that big hole over Antarctica where all of the cosmic rays are oozing in and giving us skin cancer.

If we stopped the cosmic ray seepage might that not deflect the mile-wide asteroid that is predicted to arrive any day? The last time something like that happened all the dinosaurs disappeared. Were they killed or did they exit on a space ship? And speaking of exits, do we really need all those “x’s”?

Art…should simplify.  That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole. Willa Cather