vr notic how important th lttr “” is in daily lif?
I did rcntly, whn it scapd from my computr. Thn I …
OK, I’ll quit doing that and start using the “e” again. I just wanted to show what my life was like for a while: Suddenly, inexplicably, my laptop’s “e” didn’t work. In the aftershock, Bjork (shown here) became my favorite star.
Sure, an “e” can sometimes be frustrating, when it sits silently and provocatively at the end of a word – doing nothing, but changing others. Still, it’s not as maddening as when a “k” or “w” or “p” is perched silently at the very front. That’s not knice, not wreasonable; it’s just psilly.
To see how important an “e” is, look at your Scrabble game. There are 12 of them among 100 letters; none of the other vowels come close. There are 9 a’s, 9 i’s, 8 o’s; there are only 4 u’s – none of them available whenever I have a “q.”
And even with a dozen of them, I never seem to have an “e” when I really need one – especially when I have a “z” and start to covet haze/gaze/maze/daze/laze/glaze/graze.
Without an “e,” our life would be poorer. We wouldn’t want to visit scenic Butt, Montana … or to listen to the Batls or Stons. We wouldn’t respect Dam Hln Mirrn.
So there I was, suddenly “e”-less. Possible solutions included:
— Doing nothing and hoping it would fix itself. That’s my solution to most things. It works fine for bodily cuts and bruises, not so well for the “ping” in my car engine.
— Crafting paragraphs, possibly way too circuitous, which simply avoid that particular symbol, which falls past “d” and in front of “f.” This paragraph fits that standard, but clumsily.
— Switch my focus away from people with excessive “e’s.” No Elvis, no Queen Elizabeth, definitely no E.E. Cummings.
— Create a new specialty, writing only about Icelandic celebrities. That would be led by singer-songwriter Bjork Guomundsdottir. Others include Vigdis Finnbogadottir, Bjarni Tryggvason, Gylfi Siguroson and, of course, Hafbor Julius Bjornsson. I think I like these people.
What I did, as usual, was nothing. I used a painstaking step of harvesting e’s from old stories, via control-C and control-V.
And then, after a few days, the “e” returned to my laptop. Go figure. Or, as I used to say, go figur.