New York Times Article on a Previously Unknown Letter of the English Alphabet
Everyone knows that there are, in fact, 26 letters in the English alphabet. But what everyone doesn't know is that they're wrong. Dr. Peter Gordon, a linguist at Harvard University, recently discovered a new letter not accounted for in our current alphabet. When uttered, the new letter makes a sort of "thup" sound, only the "th" part is silent. Essentially, the letter consists of two o's placed horizontally together, barely touching one another, with a single solid line extending upwards from where the o's meet. We can't actually show you what this letter looks like since current keyboards don't have it. Seriously though, we'd show you if we could.
Linguists across the globe are overjoyed by this new find. Joanne Scott, an English professor at Yale, said in a recent interview, "I for one could not be more pleased by this discovery. This thing is huge and I'm trying to take it in slowly, yet rhythmically. It's a lot to handle but I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty with this."
The new letter has numerous implications for the future of North America. For instance, current books will have to be burned, or at the very least blinked out of existence, in order to replace them with new books that contain the 27th letter. Keyboards will be replaced as well. Jack Harris, CEO of IBM, commented, "We'll be issuing new keyboards that feature the 27th letter in the next couple of months. Due to a huge number of requests from consumers, we'll also be adding a few extra keys that feature some popular words like 'and', 'the', and 'smegma.' This should save computer users a little time while typing."
Despite the excitement that has been peppered throughout the process of this discovery, a few concerns have been voiced. There remains some disagreement as to where exactly in the alphabet the 27th letter should be placed. While most seem to feel the most logical position is at the end of the alphabet, there exists a core group of linguists that strongly feel that the new letter should be placed between h and i. George Calrton, who is among this minority, argued, "The new letter should go between h and i. It doesn't deserve to be placed at the end and have such a distinguished spot in the alphabet. The whole thing is a lot like how oriental people just kind of recently appeared in the world back in the late 1970's and now they think they can just live in China and we won't mind. I'm sorry, but it doesn't work like that."
Another seemingly major concern is that the appearance of this new letter may lead to an entirely new set of speech impediments in children. The issue here is that children are dumb enough as it is and really don't need anything else adding to their already useless role in society.
While it is impossible to predict every last implication of this new find, one thing is for certain: Authorities will not allow Joan Rivers to use this new letter because, odds are, she'll fuck it up.
