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Better ways to avoid vowels

Better ways to avoid vowels

To the editor,

Although "slashes" are common and hugely popular in this era of the World Wide Web, it would have shown more initiative if Phil Villareal would have avoided words using "a"s completely in his article in the Wildcat of Monday, Feb. 21, 2000 ("A World Without A's", page 10).

It would have been enterprising on his part to have skillfully said all he wanted to say without invoking the first letter of the alphabet even once.

And it would have been most entertaining to have seen the circumlocutions of language he would have had to have gone to, had he been so original.

Original? Well, at least one work of literature to my knowledge has been written without the use of a different letter: the letter "e". The letter "e" is said to be the most frequently used letter in the English language (in fact, one could not spell "English" without it), but it does not appear in any word in this book. That book is a novel, entitled "A Void," by Georges Perec.

The wonder of it is, it is a translation! It was written originally in French.

Joe Montani

Lunar and Planetary Lab, senior research specialist