A Martyr for the Letter X

[butterflydreaming]

“Do you think the alphabet has too many letters?” asked a friend of mine, who for my own reasons I shall call "Ryuu".

“I don't think it has enough,” I retorted. I was thinking about all those useful subtleties of sound, like ñ, ç, æ, and ö.

“But what about C ?”

“It sounds like a K or an S,” I supplied as he was saying the same, but I added, “but the word would be different. Like grey and gray.” I narrowed my eyes while I looked across the table at him, over the remains of a late lunch. I hoped that he was playing devil’s advocate. “We’ve had this discussion before,” I reminded. Ryuu rolled his eyes while I was speaking of “grey”.

“Say the name of Othello’s villain,” he challenged.

“Iago,” came my immediate answer. I’m very fond of Iago.

“Yago,” he pronounced.

“EE-AH-GO,” I repeated, crisply on each letter while still saying the name quickly.

“Yago,” he insisted.

I grinned and shook my head and said the name again. This repeated for some while. “If you were Emperor…” I offered. After all, I had stated that if I were Empress of All, every drink would come with a little paper umbrella.

“We don’t need Q,” he mused.

I had to agree. “I don’t really care for Q. Especially in Scrabble.”

“But we can get rid of Y altogether,” Ryuu moved on (you see now why I’ve chosen a name spelled that way?). “And X. What does it do, really, except look cool?”

“Oh, no,” I strongly protested. “We have to keep X! I’d rather die than live in a world without X!” Ryuu laughed. I still felt disloyal for speaking against Q, so I lifted my chin up and metaphorically tied my letter’s kerchief around my arm. “I will be a martyr for the letter X,” I declared.

“We’ll line you up for the firing squad with the rest of them,” he answered without mercy.
_ _ _

There are 42 y's in that vignette, excluding title. Beer was involved, so don't think that "Ryuu" meant anything more than to get me laughing.