Words and Thoughts — February 8, 2024

Hello again, alleged readers. I must admit something to you here. Since the first time we’ve corresponded, I’ve just merely been recycling the same content. Again and again, I send you the same thing, masquerading as new, hiding behind a thin veil of re-arrangement. All of this time, whether you’ve known it or not, I’ve been using only the same 26 letters. Not once, by my count, have I ever branched out beyond the repetitive and mundane Latin Alphabet. I am truly ashamed of my lack of originality.

You should expect better of me.

As such, I’ve developed a new letter. I can’t type it here because, despite repeated faxes, the software engineers over at Alludo haven’t released an update for my version of Corel WordPerfect with the new letter added yet. So I’ll describe it for you.

Start with a vertical bar, like a lowercase “L”. Right next to the first vertical bar, you start drawing another line, left to right, that ultimately needs to end up being shaped like Mount Rushmore. Once you have the vertical bar and Mount Rushmore next to each other, just below that draw a shape that looks like the sky. Finally, place an umlaut over the last letter “M” that you wrote or typed. If you don’t yet have a letter “M” in whatever document you are working on yet, find a spot to put one.

The name of my new letter is “Formpt”. Formpt is a versatile letter. By itself, it makes the sound a raccoon makes when you make it listen to too much ska music. However, Formpt and the letter J together make a “qwa” sound. Two Formpts together are always silent, but they turn all of the other consonants in that word into aspirated fricatives.

Frankly I don’t know what we’ve done without the letter Formpt, and why it wasn’t developed sooner!  Until Corel patches Formpt into the standard typesets though, we’ll just have to settle for the usual letters. I really appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Anyway, remember roller blades? Coolest things ever, right? There’s a guy at my work named Byan. I thought I had his name wrong, but he says it’s “like Ryan with a ‘B'”. He roller blades a lot, and I said to him, “Hey, this summer break, I think I’m going to get back into roller blading.” However, he replied, “Stav, what summer break? We don’t get a summer break.”

I’m like, “Byan, I’ve worked here for probably over three years now, and not once have I seen the office from June through August. I mean, why would they have us practice summer break in school if we weren’t gonna use it in the real world? Gotta use your brain a little there, Byan!” Byan’s probably been spending summers figuring out the area of the hypotenuse of a mitochondria!

Byan’s a good dude though. A little dense, but a good dude for sure. Imagine if they made us go to work during the summer. That’d be so stupid! People would probably riot. I know I would.