Why Liturgy?

I perceive the potential for a powerful analogy here. As I re-read my previous post, I spotted an apparent contradition, a paradox. While atonal, serialist music sought to retrain the hearer to listen to music without reference to canons of harmony and voice leading, the very same music was grounded in a very strict school whose founder, Arnold Schoenberg, laid down very specific rules. So it wasn't really a flight from rule-bound tradition to anarchic liberty, but from one set of rules to another.

You see the same kind of flight in Christian churches that reject the historic liturgy. In practice, it works out to a switch from one form of liturgy to another. Anyone who seriously tries to abandon all semblance of ritual is chasing a pipe dream. For it is impossible for any creative individual or group to keep up a constant flow of originality for very long. Eventually, to save themselves from burnout, they will resort to some sort of template, a common structure, even a form of words being repeated week after week, year after year. The same crowd that shrinks back in horror from any vestige of ritual, inevitably ends up explaining that some ritual - such as the church year cycle of Bible texts, for example - is not just "liturgically correct" but also "Christ-centered." (A column in the September 2009 issue of Worship Leader magazine does exactly that.) What they've realized is that they can't escape from the need for some type of external ceremony, the very sort of thing they used to condemn as legalistic - and now they need a new set of princples to make sure that whatever they are repeating is of God and not just of man.

There is no escape. You're holding out on going to church because you don't like "religion," in the sense of slavish adherence to tradition and ritual. But at some point, you're going to need the objectivity of ritual, the reliability of tradition, to reassure you that your sense of being personally saved isn't just a case of the vapors. And let's face it, its repetitiveness is precisely its strength. The liturgy, properly employed, is the most powerful aid to memory the church has at its disposal. Kids need the liturgy to teach them the faith, because chances are they aren't going to absorb much in the classroom setting. Old folks need the liturgy to refresh their memory at a stage in life where the mind tends to leak like a sieve; as one of my spiritual mentors liked to say, "The first thing in is the last thing out."

And the generations in between need the liturgy to keep them from going "every one to his own way," from being drawn away by vain conceits and alluring deceits. They need its horizon to give their faith a sort of spacial orientation. They need its rhythm to mark time while they wait for the next new thing to happen. They need its light to show them the way home when they stumble and stray. They need its Law and Gospel utterances, to call them to repent and assure them of forgiveness in season and out of season. They need its encouraging exhortations to comfort the brokenhearted, to sustain the afflicted, to strengthen the tempted, to give confidence to those who risk all for the kingdom, and to send the dying onward to possess their crown. They need its unvarying solidity to bring disparate cultures and generations together on common ground, and to keep the guy up front in the cheap suit from making it all about him and his pet ideas.

In short, even non-liturgical Christians need a liturgy, the same way that Schoenberg realized that even atonalism needed a book of music theory. They can't avoid having one. If they won't accept a liturgical heritage passed down from earlier generations, they will make one up for themselves. The question then becomes, what is their liturgy teaching them? Where does it come from? What does it point to? Where does it get its power from? Who is saying what, who is doing what, and to whom? What seed is it planting in the soil of their hearts? Could the word of God dwell in them any more richly than it does through the historic liturgy? Whatever the answer to these other questions may be, the answer to that last one, I think, is "No."

Why Tonality?

Around the middle of the last century, the musical vocabulary of western art music broadened, or loosened - some might even say decayed - to the point where the listener lost the sense of a home key (tonality), or even of a special relationship between any two chords (functional harmony). All twelve notes of the chromatic scale were given equal weight. Harmonies were extended to include notes traditionally thought of as dissonant, without necessarily bringing any resolution of the tension. Listeners were to be re-educated to stop expecting a note or chord to resolve in a certain direction, to cease being surprised when they did not, and finally to accept whatever they heard without conscious reference to a system of rules.

Musical structures were related to a twelve-tone series (tone row), ordered in a sequence of intervals whose distinctiveness allowed it to be transposed into other keys, flipped backwards and/or upside down, combined in chords, distributed across an enesemble of instruments, plugged into rhythmic patterns, etc., while retaining its identity. "Serialism" was born, and some of its disciples vied with each other to achieve a transcendant state of atonality. Such composers brainstormed ways of ordering a tone-row so that none of its permutations (inversions, retrogrades, etc.) or six-note segments (hexachords), or four-note ditto (tetrachords), could be combined in a manner that even remotely suggested tonal harmony. Their quest for atonal rigor resulted in unreadably dense music theory texts, mined with such words as semicombinatoriality.

Listening to some serialist music can require a degree of mental discipline akin to doing Zen meditation on a commuter train during rush hour. I once borrowed the complete works of Anton Webern from the library - they fit on a set of 3 CDs - and poured over the scores while listening to them on a boom-box during an evening on lobby duty when I was a dorm monitor in college. The music had a noticeable effect on traffic passing through the lobby. One student finally came forward and asked: "Why are you punishing us like this?" I couldn't wholly disagree with his opinion of Webern's music. I was trying to understand it. But it required a lot of work on my part, and it gave scant rewards in return.

Admittedly, serialist music wasn't helped by the sketchy performances captured on recording, especially in the early years of the movement. One gathers that it didn't sound the way the composers intended, at least until a new generation of musicians developed the performance techniques demanded by the music. Besides, there are many approaches to serialism. Some of them aren't as strict in their mathematical precision, erring on the side of expressiveness and textural transparency. Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and other notable serialists wrote music that was, above all, musical, music that has moved audiences emotionally and that I have personally enjoyed.

But I think their doctrinaire devotion to atonality got in their own way. I'm sure many musicians and composers felt likewise. Only thus can you explain the story one of my college profs (also a professional composer) once told me. He said he was driving along I-10 in the Los Angeles area when he heard a radio personality interviewing a disciple of Schoenberg who declared that serialism was dead. On hearing this, my prof-to-be pulled his car onto the shoulder, stepped out and gave the horizon a round of applause. For too long, serialism had been a force of musical orthodoxy, apart from which no modern composer could be taken seriously. Many composers were delighted to see it fall.

Happily, I have lived in times when tonal music is making somewhat of a comeback. I think there are good reasons to encourage the return of tonality and functional harmony to the world of fine-art music. And those reasons aren't simply a reactionary retreat to the past. Without necessarily offering an original thought, let me try to put the main reasons out there for musical laymen to consider.

First, there's the matter of how music enters the human mind, how our mental apparatus receives it and perceives it. I am with those who think that a system of twelve equal tones, without an intrinsic hierarchy, is incompatible with the human brain.

Second, with a hierarchical system of tonality comes, inevitably, a system of functional harmony. This chord leads, by a natural progression, to that chord. Depending on which direction the chord-progression moves, one can get a sense of the music either pulling uphill or relaxing downhill, turning unexpected corners, glimpsing distant vistas, or settling down at home. Unexpected notes (dissonances) and delays in resolving them generate tension. Chords whose notes could be arranged as a stack of thirds (triads, and to a lesser extent their extended forms such as seventh and ninth chords) offer the largest and most diverse range of harmonic choices of any harmonic system, a remarkable variety of possible sonorities that included twelve different major triads, twelve minor triads, twelve diminished, and (if you must know) four augmented triads, each susceptible of up to two "inversions" (i.e., you can make them sound like a different chord just by putting a different member of the triad at the bottom). Extended triads and their inversions allowed even more color and variety. The functional progressions between all these chords gave music a sense of direction that could be modulated in a huge number of ways.

Compare this system of functional triads to, say, the late-late-tonal harmony of Scriabin. Scriabin leaned heavily on certain sophisticated chords, sophisticated compared to the humble triad. But such a chord used up so many of the available notes that it was basically the same no matter how you turned it, and it could only be transposed into one or two keys before the transpositions started repeating themselves. You could fill an entire symphony with such advanced chords, and have as a result much less harmonic variety, and a much weaker sense of the physics of chords pushing and pulling this way and that. A Scriabin symphony could therefore have very sophisticated chords in it, yet be (from a harmonic standpoint) relatively static and even monotonous, compared to the way triadic harmony was used to increasingly vibrant effect between the heyday of Haydn and the time of, let's say, Brahms. I think, after that point, tonal harmony continued to be used effectively but, as its vocabulary became broader and more inclusive, the grammar of functionality broke down.

Three is a holy number, so I'll stop at three main reasons why I think tonality and functional harmony are essential to make new music as powerful as it can be. But it's a view that, I anticipate, will provoke a lot of dissent and debate. After all, even the argument that hierarchy is essential to musical perception (Reason #1) remains a hot topic for debate, and I'm sure the directionality/variety argument (#2) is a pill some will have a hard time swallowing. But this one really takes the cake. Let me know what you think about it in the Comments, but don't expect me to change my opinion. I think - here it comes - that tonal music better reflects a confession of faith in an all-creating God, who has ordered the cosmos according to a rich design; and that He has given His creation a perceptible structure in which everything has its rightful place, both obeying laws built into its design and continually revealing new facets (mysteries). And I think atonal serialism, at bottom, suggests a random universe where anything can happen, given enough time - a world in which meaning is imposed by the mind of the observer, by analogy to itself and by means of the perceptive filters that selectively interpret or ignore the sensory data that flood into it. In short, I would choose tonality, even if it went against the intellectual orthodoxy du jour, as a confession of my faith and an extension of my worldview.

Lying to the Church

How do you know if your church leaders, or those campaigning for office in the church, are lying to you? Here are some doozies that should raise red flags...

"The administrative organs of the church are strictly advisory" - Ah, the myth of servant leadership! For once they're in power, they suddenly begin describing themselves as "ecclesiastical supervisors," suing breakaway congregations for control of church property, and placing anyone who dissents from their policies under the ban.

"Our leadership will be transparent and accountable" - except when it isn't. Don't expect full disclosure of the church body's financial position. More and more decisions will be made in executive session, behind closed doors and blanketed by a gag rule. Surprise!

"We have a heart for missions" - as evidenced by the withdrawal of so many career missionaries from the field, and the prohibition against word-and-sacrament ministry that hamstrings many who remain. But in the sense of self-funded, short-term, mission-themed tourists providing health services, caregiving, and ESL, we have more "missionaries" than ever!

"Everyone is a minister" - the old "priesthood of all believers" scam. Yet the churches whose "policy-based governance" we are holding up as a model for the future concentrate more power in the hands of the staff or a board of directors, reducing the bulk of church members to customers or audience members; and with the praise team leading services, the audience's role in worship grows increasingly passive.

"Worship forms are adiaphora" - i.e. a matter of free choice. And yet, once you accept this and let the contemporary, "pop music" brand of worship get its foot in the door, the story changes. From then on the party line is that if you love Jesus and want to save souls, this style of worship is what you have to do.

"As long as we keep our theology straight, we can use any methodology that gets the job done" - as if the doctrines we believe don't imply a certain approach to worship, outreach, etc. Or, conversely, as if our methodology doesn't imply a particular theology...

"We're going to grow the church" - but in what respect? Spiritually? Numerically? Financially? In every respect, this has proven to be an empty promise. Before the church began basing its policies on "church growth," it was actually growing. Now it isn't. Maybe it's a coincidence. But the question remains: How long are we going to keep believing this promise, in spite of evidence to the contrary?

"It's not your grandfather's church anymore" - What? You think any of this is new? This same junk has been going on since Adam and Eve! And the same lying snake is behind it, too!

Software Woes

In the course of my work, I have become fairly proficient in many, many, many computer programs. For example, on any given day I will most certainly use Microsoft Word and Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and InDesign, Mozilla Firefox, Libronix, BibleWorks, AskSam, Dymo Label Maker, a client program for a color-proof RIP server, and the native interface of a top-level scanner. At least a few times a month I may also have Nero Burning ROM, Parsons Screenshot, Neato MediaFace, Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, MyOffice, and Adobe Bridge open on my desktop. In recent weeks I have used Irfanview, Opera, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and a font management program whose name I forget. And that's besides the apps I use at home.

As a result, I often have many different things open on my desktop at once. And some of those things conflict with each other. For instance, certain keyboard shortcuts don't work properly in InDesign while a BibleWorks session is floating nearby. Fonts that I can't live without for a quarter of an hour, any time of day, due to my constant work in Outlook and AskSam, conflict with fonts I need to use in (sigh--again) InDesign. I don't want to think about how much time I spend each week setting up my custom toolbar in Acrobat, only to have it revert to default for reasons as yet undiscovered.

Twice today, Word refused to allow me to save changes to my template, forcing me to do a lot of extra steps. And font troubles have been plaguing me all week, so that I have to deal with "pinked out" text in InDesign, gibberish when I print emails from Outlook, pagination glitches when I convert Firefox webpages into Adobe PDFs, bizarre and arbitrary format changes in AskSam, and a display font that I have to blow up to 400% magnification to read accurately in Word.

But it's hard to complain when you're using many of these programs way beyond the level at which most people experience them. One of our IT guys shocked me, a few years ago, with this answer to a question about Microsoft Word: "You tell me. You're doing stuff with this program that no one else does, that I know of. In fact, I'm thinking about referring some of my other clients to you when they have questions about Word." It's true that I push Word to the limits of its word-processing powers - which are actually far more extensive than most people realize.

I have formatted printer-ready books in Word (though the final step was converting to an Adobe PDF). I have printed in booklet format, with multiple columns of text, sometimes overlapping watermark images and at other times wrappng around pictures. I have used a wide range of special characters, generated a numerous "customized keyboard" commands and a vast number of Autotext entries, and moved macros and autotexts (which is to say, document templates) from one computer to another. I have used Word to create music, outlines, footnotes, indices, tables of contents, tables, hyperlinks (some of them leading to offline documents in Word and other applications), 3"x5" cards, labels, filing tabs, and fully addressed envelopes. I make constant use of headers, footers, autotexts, style & format macros, multiple print drivers, and various methods of sending a document as an email. So I expect a lot from Word, and I ought to.

Which is why the last couple of months has been so frustrating. Good old MS Word is just not what it used to be. It's not that we upgraded. My office declined to switch to Vista and Word 2007 because the (then) new version of Word wasn't able to do some things that we constantly used it to do. But now even the previous generation isn't cutting the mustard. When did Word start applying all (or rather, most - with random exceptions) local format changes to a document globally? Because it does this, nearly every time I try to put something in Italics, bold, underlining, a numbered or bulleted list, an indented paragraph, a different font style or size, etc., I then immediately have to hit "ctrl-z" to undo Word's global interpretation of what I intended as a local edit. Due to the nature of my work, this has made some tasks hellishly frustrating and way more time- and labor-intensive than they should be.

A related problem comes up whenever I use that "ctrl-z" command to back out of a global edit, when (as is nearly always the case) my document has a header. The moment I hit UNDO, Word donates another paragraph return at the end of the header, thus pushing the text a little farther down the page. After a few of these back-and-forth edits, I have to open the header and delete a bunch of blank paragraphs in order to pull the body text back up to the top half of each page. Why would Word do this? How can I persuade it to stop?

Having to halfway undo every style/format change is like pounding my head against a digital wall. It's an unpleasant passtime, but you can work it into your routine. But then, imagine that each time you pound your head, your cyber-pants slip down an inch or so. After twelve or eighteen pounds, your clean white drawers are showing and you have to stop headbanging to pull your jeans up again.

I could complain about other things Word has just recently decided to do. It's as if Microsoft sent out a patch that "fixed" a working application so that it doesn't work as well. If this is their sales pitch for upgrading to a later version of Word, I'm not tempted.

All we like sheep...

Tonight I listened to the choruses from Handel's Messiah, as performed by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the chorus of the University of California at Berkeley, and the very same Nicholas McGegan who is going to conduct yours truly (and other members of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus) in Messiah next month.

I had to buy the recording because I had recently read Norman Lebrecht's Life and Death of Classical Music, an insider's history of the 20th century classical recording industry, which numbers McGegan's Messiah among the 100 most important classical recordings todate. So I ordered a used copy on the cheap, via Amazon Marketplace, and spent my first free evening filling my ears with it.

I have to hand it to those Berkeley choristers - they're not bad for college kids. At least they rose to the challenge of all the coloratura. On the other hand, and forgive me if I tend to blame the school of "authentic performance practice" for this, I was a little underwhelmed by the dramatic side of the piece. To be sure, I was skipping the solo numbers, which carry a lot of the juice. But I had an uncomfortable sense of having too little asked of my attention. And so I had time to make unhappy observations. For example, I observed that some of the choruses we're cutting from our performance next month - most notably "Their sound is gone out" - are a little light in the way of inspiration. One of the "alternate version" numbers provided with the set, "Break forth into joy," is seriously lacking. The fact that Handel's librettist was disappointed with some of the music doesn't seem so shocking now. I was a little disappointed myself.

On the other hand, there were surprises of the other kind. I thought the Hallelujah chorus on McGegan's recording was exceptional. It broke every cliche about the piece, making it sound fresh and exciting. The end of the Amen also struck me as having been made new, somehow. But there was one movement that I must now add to my list of "things that made me cry." To be precise, it made me feel choked up. My eyes didn't exactly leak. But it was so close. And that moment was the end of "All we like sheep have gone astray," where the playful gambolling of the wayward lambs is suddenly brought to a stand with the awful realization that "the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all."

For a couple of minutes, being lost in sin sounded like a lot of fun. And then, without even a screech of rubber on the road, there is a breathless stillness before the cross. The same sheep that have been aimlessly turning round and round, and merrily baaing and skipping in their lostness, suddenly find themselves faced with the shame and horror of Calvary. It's no wonder they (we) freeze. What can they do but stare in awe as the cost of their amusement is paid by Another?

Irreformable Spelling

A while ago, I posted a whimsical set of spelling reform "edicts." Clearly, I wasn't in earnest about them. But I admit that I've always been the type of guy who can't help thinking about the possibility of reforming English spelling. Many people have brought proposals forward. None of them have turned out to be practical. And I have decided to resign my hopes as well.

Theoretically, there are a lot of ways you could approach the reform of English spelling. In practice, however, each way has problems.

First, you could assign a different letter to each phoneme, which would mean introducing letters that don't currently exist in our alphabet. (This would give us an excuse to ransack other writing systems, such as Cyrillic, for handy characters not found in the Roman system). Then each consonant and vowel sound in English would be represented by exactly one letter, which would represent no other sound. Second, you could develop a consistent system of multiple-letter combinations, such as ch, dh, sh, th, zh, etc. to represent certain sounds, so that we could get by with even fewer letters than we now use. Or, theoretically (as my facetious edicts demonstrated), you could simply repurpose the letters of the existing alphabet to serve our needs more efficiently. And finally, short of inventing an entirely new writing system - and surprisingly few people in history have really had the genius for such a feat - you could throw some diacritical marks over and under the existing letters to clarify which of their multiple pronunciations is in use at a given point - especially when it comes to vowels.

The main problem with all of these options, a problem I am by no means first to point out, is that each regional variation in pronouncing a given word would result in a different spelling of that word. If one goal of spelling reform is to standardize spelling throughout the anglophone world, this one-to-one, phonetic approach would be self-defeating. Worse, it would probably result in more variant spellings than just British vs. American; or, if a standard spelling was somehow enforced, in simply another case where, for most speakers, words were pronounced otherwise than as spelled.

Besides, I have come to appreciate the charm of the differences between British and American spelling. You can spot which part of the anglophone world a writer comes from, often simply by observing which way he spells such words as color/colour, fiber/fibre, draft/draught, jail/gaol, etc. The most fun discoveries, for fans of regional spelling quirks, are the inarticulate grunts and sound effects that people casually sprinkle into their speech, such as uh/er, duh/der, nyah/nyer, ew/eurgh, and aah/aargh. It's enough to make an American pause and reconsider the letter R.

Then there are the homonyms, homophones, homographs, all those "homo" words, that make English such a risky and exciting linguistic track to race on. If the soundalike words were all spelled the same, how would we tell them apart? For literate people, isn't the difference in spelling one of the ways we mentally distinguish between homophones? Plays on words won't be so clever - nor so readily appeciated - when they've stopped being separate words and become different definitions of the same word. And fine distinctions like "effect" vs. "affect," troublesome though they may be, won't be as easy to make.

Another problem began growing on my mind after I posted my Spelling Edicts spoof. When you read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in my "reformed" spelling, it really doesn't look like itself. Too much of the essential character of the language is tied up in its spelling. The history of its development is in there, too. Related words may appear more similar to each other in writing than they sound to the ear. Knowledge of that kinship between them is part of the context in which they are used, often in a clever way that cannot be appreciated if their spellings are forced to conform to strict, phonetic rules. Even forms of the same word lose contact with each other across the chasm of phonetic spelling, whereas their archaic, somewhat arbitrary, traditional spelling preserves a remnant of that relationship.

There's a genius in that, too, like the way German uses the umlaut to keep the same vowel letter in a verb stem even when (due to a sound shift that happened centuries ago) each tense is pronounced with a different vowel sound. I use the example from a sister tongue because it may be easier for us to perceive its aptness than if I tried to demonstrate it through English examples. By the same token, then, who would expect /froilain/ to be a diminutive form of /frau/? Yet two little dots enable Frau and Fräulein to stand side by side, their etymological relationship unmistakable.

There are many similar instances in English, groups of words that would appear wholly unrelated if we spelled them phonetically, but whose interrelatedness becomes apparent when you see them spelled. Words such as who and what, closely related pronouns that in a phonetic system might not have a single letter in common. Here and there, for another example, are a matched pair of adverbs that, in "Spelling Edictese," would be rendered hir and yer. And words like the, which (at least the way I was brought up to use it) is pronounced with one vowel-sound when followed by a consonant and another when followed by a vowel - entirely left up to the discretion of the speaker, of course - would appear in print as two different words whose morphology might be difficult to explain. I know people whose dual pronunciation of the word the runs exactly opposite to mine; it irritates me just a bit when I hear them, but I think it would irritate me even more if I had to fuss over how to spell our language's most frequently-used and inconsequential word, every single time it came up, and above all to have to take into account each individual speaker's proclivities.

Bottom line, I like English spelling. Warts and all. It has so many fine details of cultural background fossilized in it. We have borrowed many French terms, few of which we pronounce as the French do, but whose Frenchness is kept evergreen by the English language's easy-come, easy-go canons of spelling. A francophone struggling to read a page from an American newspaper might feel encouraged, now and then, by the random appearance of a word he knows and loves. Meanwhile, an American is hard put to decipher words the Japanese language has appropriated from English, even after they have been transliterated into Roman letters. A perfectly systematic written language, like Romaji, cannot tolerate the existence of foreign words. It must obliterate their foreignness. It casts a magic spell on them - the spell of spelling - and their outlandish origins disappear.

I am aware that some people, such as the composer Percy Grainger, hold that English speakers should use only words derived from Anglo-Saxon roots. Thus, instead of coining a new word by sticking a Greek prefix in front of a Latin stem, we ought to jam two Anglo-Saxon stems together and make a new word out of them. The German language does this a lot: Handschuh (glove), for example, is such a hippogriff word, made by suturing "hand" and "shoe" together. Maybe that works for German folks. But English language has a cosmopolitan streak. How could we say that our language had a certain je ne sais quoi without dipping into the treasury of another language? And if we insisted on spelling that term zhernersehkwah, what would we have? Nothing but a piece of random gibberish, anointed with a given meaning (I don't know what). Imagine that word dropped into a transcript of a cultured conversations. The perplexed speaker, reviewing the transcript, would swear he had said something in French - but not even a native French-speaker would be able to find it if he looked for it!

No, folks. English spelling is best left alone. It's not as if ours is the only language that hazes anyone who attempts to learn it as a second tongue. Pity any one coming to Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Amharic as an adult - there are too many characters to learn. If you want to be able to read a newspaper in such a language, you need to start young and study hard. Or take Vietnamese and Gaelic: two languages that use Roman letters, but in such a complex and idosyncratic way that the adult learner must live each day on the edge of despair. Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic have extremely learnable writing systems; I would love to have an opportunity to master Thai, Hindi, or similar scripts. Sooner that than figure out how to predict the spelling of a Gaelic sentence from its pronunciation, or vice versa.

And some languages clearly have the wrong alphabet; some have even changed alphabets, by law, within living memory. Some southern Slavic languages, for example, switched from Cyrillic to Roman writing systems during the last century. How I pity the folks who speak those languages - especially those whose lives cross cultural and linguistic borders into an area where a closely related spoken language is written in a vastly different alphabet. I think there are similar cases in and around the Subcontinent, where Sanskrit-based scripts have been exchanged for Arabic-based ones, or vice versa. Urdu, they say, is a language virtually identical to Hindi, yet their vocabularies and writing systems are mutually unintelligible. Maybe that doesn't seem like such a tragedy if you live in or around Pakistan, but it does give you pause when you hear that some bright-eyed know-all wants all English speakers to replace the Roman alphabet with some custom-designed hybrid of Sumerian and Hittite. Folks in Papua New Guinea, whose pidgin is based substantially on English, would need their own Rosetta stone to be able to decipher Australian missionaries' tracts. I can't imagine a worse tragedy.

One-Liner

I occupied my mind during yesterday's commute to work by improvising a comedy sketch. It had some zingers in it, but I can only remember one of them now. I suppose that's because I repeated it several times to get the intonation right. Properly delivered, it begins piously and ends in a hiss of evil glee:

I don't like to speak evil of the dead... That's why I work so hard to get it all in while they're still alive!