[[Previous]] [Menu] [[Next]]

Page 126

The owl hoots or screeches or howls
voweluminously. Double O's and E's are
cheaper in English than vacuum's double U --
but how rich in nothingness must be WOW
or UUOUU!

The Indians and Japs in my childhood comics
always died in vowels: "AIEEE!" they screamed,
while cowboys and Yankee soldiers grunted their
blunter deaths: "Uh!" and "Ugh" -- but why
isn't "Ugh" pronounced "You"? -- that is, U,
as in "Hugh," who can never hug?
(Like my reader, Gee, you are silent.)

I should visit Europe to learn whether
those Slavs, who have villages with names like
Brzn and call themselves names like "Czechs"
(suffering from acute vowel deficiency)
die with vowelless avowals, going out, perhaps,
with a "fzzzt" or a "Krggghcz!" (The Welsh, too,
welsh on vowels.)

(There has been much recent Bosnian research
into how Slavs die. Has no one studyed this aspect?
What a terrible waste of a war!)

Could we not, in these globalist days (vowels
being globular, spanning consonants), open
a flourishing trade between the Slavic countries
and East Asia (with expert aid from Hawaii),
vowels for consonants, tight, brittle Slavic words
opening out lusciously like concertinas
or becoming the sharp hard beaks of song birds,
and in Asia, mellifluous streams of words encountering
cataracts (and we mustn't waste the alternative
metaphors: Asian words becoming babies graduating
from pabulum to crunchy treats; Asians learning to chew
their words cautiously, as if fearing sand in their rice....)

Note: I equate "wow" to "uuouu" because the letter W (double-U) was represented by "uu" in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts until around 900 A.D. These days W refers to the President of the United States, because he's George W. Bush and because so many of us find ourselves pointing at him, furiously trying and failing to tell him what he is: "You...you...!"

"Like my reader, Gee, you are silent" refers to the silent G (or Gee) in "Hugh".

[Previous] [Menu] [Next]