Outlet News
Scientists Discover New Letter
Scientists today announced the
discovery of the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. "This will revolutionize our whole
approach to language," Dr. Anson Bernstein told a distinguished
interdisciplinary gathering of scholars.
According to Bernstein, the new
letter, discovered by a team of linguaphysicists at Princeton University, lies
between I and J in the traditional alphabet, making it the tenth letter. "We've known
theoretically for some time that
there had to be an object exerting a strong gravitational pull on the tail of
the J, but we just weren't able to isolate the 'new' letter until now,"
Bernstein explained. He said that the
Princeton team had worked around the clock, employing an intricate combination
of precise measurement, computer modeling, integral calculus, and "good
old-fashioned intuition" to map out the coordinates of the new letter.
Linguaphysics is a scientific
discipline that uses advanced technology to study the alphabet. Until the early 1990s, the field was generally held in disrepute by members
of the "mainstream" scientific community, but in recent years there
has been a growing awareness of the enormous benefits that could be derived
from more rigorous exploitation of global linguistic resources. "A consensus is emerging among scholars
who are in the loop that science and literature are essentially the same thing,
except for the numbers," Bernstein explained.
President Bush responded to the announcement of
the new letter in a hastily convened Rose Garden press conference this
afternoon. "We have assembled a
commission of experts to study the new
letter and report back in three months," he
told reporters. "We are cautiously
optimistic about this discovery, but the safety of the American people has to
be our main concern. Our language is
our
primary national resource and nothing couldn’t
be more importanter than protecting it safeguarded"
Senator Edward Kennedy concurred with the
President’s positive response to the development: "I envision that use of
the new letter will free up other letters and enable the creation of new
acronyms.
That means more government agencies to better
serve the needs of the American people," he added.
But evangelist Pat Robertson spoke out against
the new letter. "This letter is not in the King James Bible. If there were really a twenty-seventh
letter, Jesus would have used it," he asserted.
Robertson dismissed as "New Age
claptrap" speculation that the new letter might be one of the ones missing
from the Hebrew Bible. "Jesus
Christ is the Alpha and the Omega. CBN
will not
air the new letter," he vowed.
The international response was mixed. "This is the first substantial American
contribution to the English language, and the British people welcome it,"
said Prime Minister Tony Blair. Sources
inside Iraq suggest that Saddam Hussein is planning to add the new letter to
his name, just as soon as the pronunciation is clarified, and as long as the
new letter doesn't turn out to be Jewish.
The French government issued an angry statement:
"French scientists have been studying the new letter and were close to
making an announcement when Princeton jumped the gun. We cannot allow the French language to be pilfered like
this. This will set back the relations
between our two great nations," it declared.
In a rare public appearance, North Korean
dictator Kim Jong-Il threatened to invade the South if the new letter was not
repealed. He asserted that the new letter had been well known in Korea for
over four thousand years. "Pyongyang is just posturing,"
said a State Department source, citing a recent CIA report that the North was
critically short of phonemes. “They
work hard to show off a few striking consonants but there are many remote areas
of their alphabet where most of the letters are too weak to
be employable,” he added.
Cuban President Fidel Castro appealed to the
United Nations to exercise control over the new letter. "The new letter belongs to the whole
world, not the United States. First
they plant their flag on
the Moon, and now this," he commented. Russian President Vladimir Putin was more
supportive: "We Russians are not afraid of this new letter. We have plenty of new letters of our
own," he said.
In a special address from the balcony of St.
Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II called upon the peoples of the world to
receive the new letter with gratitude, and in a spirit of profound reflection.
"We must pray that this new letter not become a source of division and
disunity among us," he warned.
Bernstein evaded questions about the likelihood
of more new letters being discovered in the near future. His associate, Dr. Laura Sterling, was more
forthcoming: "Nobody really knows what's out there," she conceded,
"We still don't have an entirely satisfactory explanation for that little
thing that sticks out from the side of the Q.
On the other hand, it may be a long time before we have lenses that can
really penetrate some of the other problem areas, and our computers may not yet
be fast enough to process all of the data." Both scientists dismissed as "sour grapes" a claim by
professors at M.I.T. that the new letter was simply a smudge caused by Dr.
Sterling's mascara.
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