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The Court of Linguistic Efficiency convened. The defendant: the letter C.
Prosecutor K rose. “Your Honor, the letter C is redundant. Every sound it makes is already covered by other letters. The hard C — ‘cat’ — is a K sound. The soft C — ‘city’ — is an S sound. The CH sound — ‘church’ — has its own letter combination. C contributes nothing that K and S cannot.”
Defense attorney stood. “Without C, how would we write ‘chaos’?”
“‘Kaos.’ Next question.”
“And ‘science’?”
“‘Siens.’ The letter C appears twice in that word, making two different sounds, neither of which requires C.”
A murmur in the courtroom.
The judge asked C to take the stand. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
C was silent. Because, technically, C cannot speak without borrowing sounds from K or S.
The prosecution rested. The defense had no further witnesses.
Verdict: Guilty of redundancy. Sentence: Phased retirement, effective immediately.
But the verdict was appealed. The appeal was filed in English, which — as everyone knows — respects no court, follows no logic, and has never fired a letter it paid for. C continues to work. It still has tenure.
I will be the expert witness for the prosecution.
Exhibit A: My daughter’s vocabulary list. Twenty words. Twelve of them contain the letter C. In not one of them does C make the same sound twice.
Exhibit B: “Crapulous.” C sounds like K. “Recumbentibus.” C sounds like K again—but wait, the first one is hard, the second one is soft? No? They are both hard? I had to check. I am an engineer with a university degree and I had to check. That is the C problem in one word.
Exhibit C: My daughter is not learning phonics. She is learning exceptions. Every word with a C is an exception to the rule you thought you just learned about C. At some point, the exceptions outnumber the rules, and the rules stop being rules and start being suggestions from a language that changed its mind three times before breakfast.
The letter C is guilty. I do not know what the sentence should be—probation, at minimum. But I know this: if English were designed by engineers, C would have been fired in version 1.2 and replaced with K and S, which at least know what they are doing.
I rest my case.
— Michael Nguyen, P.E.
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