Hints for Reformers

I

THIS communication is going to be a nuisance to you. For it will be much too short for a regular article and it will be much too long for a mere ‘ letter to the Editor.’ Yet, it contains a few things that ought to be said, and (with a flattering bow to the Editorial Easy-Chair) who could be a better spokesman in so urgent a matter of human happiness than the Atlantic Monthly?

I read Mr. F. Emerson Andrews’s vastly intriguing article about numbers. He is undoubtedly right. I am too old and too hopelessly set in my respect for the sacred number 10 to adopt the duodecimal system. The decimal system was taught me in the Dutch schools of my childhood. Being a neat sort of person, I never experienced great difficulties with it (after all, are n’t algebra and non-Euclidian geometry merely a matter of neatness?), but since then my career as a vaguely literary person has made such slight demands upon my mathematical abilities that to-day I just leave it to the bank (which is always right) and settle the matter by saying, ‘I am very sorry. I will send you something to fill the gap just as soon as I can, but it will probably happen again.’

I have, however, a few ideas upon similar aspects of the cosmic imbecility of mankind which I should like to expose to you here and now. Somebody else less occupied than I happen to be may then take them in hand and bring them to fruition.

Here is idea No. 1.

Why, in the name of common sense, do we stick to the idiotic business of A.M. and P.M. ? It leads to endless difficulties and misunderstandings. In the first place, it is very difficult to remember. ‘Now what did Jimmie say? Was she arriving at 10 A.M. or 10 P.M.?’ In such a dilemma, one can, of course, telegraph for further instructions, but an absent-minded telegraph clerk may botch the whole business by changing his A into a P, or vice versa. And, handwriting nowadays being what it is, one can hardly blame the telegraph man for these very common mistakes.

Europe has settled this problem by dropping the old twelve-hour clocks and introducing the twenty-four-hour ditto. By a single stroke of the pen, the backward European nations have made an end to the A.M. and P.M. comedy of errors. It is now 23.14 instead of 11.14 P.M., and 3.10 instead of 3.10 A.M.

And one is no longer obliged to read through the foreword of a railroad or steamboat time-table to discover whether the A.M. trains and boats are printed in heavy black characters while the P.M.’S are rendered in somewhat softer colors. Nor is one forced to confess that advancing age has done strange things to the eyesight and that without the help of a magnifying glass one can see absolutely no difference between the type used for P.M. and A.M.

As for the difficulty (often expressed whenever I ride this favorite hobby) which will be experienced by people who simply cannot subtract from any given number between 12 and 24, my answer is that such creatures should not travel at all. Sooner or later they will become a public charge of the railroads they patronize, and from the railroads they will be promoted into one of Mr. Roosevelt’s charitable institutions, and God knows I pay enough taxes now as it is.

II

That was the first of my suggestions, but there is another one of equal importance.

Can’t something be done about the names of the letters of our alphabet? Now that we are in the habit of spelling out lengthy day letters and night letters by telephone, we are in constant need of the letters of the alphabet. They may have served their purpose when Archimedes wanted to send a day letter to Aristotle telling him that things equal to the same thing were equal to everything else. Alpha, beta, gamma, may have sounded clear and distinct to the Western Union boys of ancient Hellas, but they are merely so much Mumbo Jumbo to the Postal Telegraph girls of the year of grace 1934.

To overcome this difficulty, every country has invented a system of substitute names for the letters of the alphabet, and these are supposed to solve the problem and to prevent misunderstandings. When I call up the bright and obliging young man in Manchester, Vermont, I can revaluate the ordinary A, B, C, D, E, F, G into Albert, Boston, Charles, Denver, Edward, Frank, and George. But if I happen to be in Surabaya and have business to do with Batavia (Java, and not New York) I have got to deal with an entirely different family, consisting of Anna, Bernard, Cornelis, Dirk, Eduard, Frits, Gerard, and Hendrik, ending with Xantippe and Zacherias, who are preceded, believe it or not, by Ysbeer, Izaäk, and Quadraat.

I have not got a copy of the Moscow telephone book at my disposal, nor one of the recently Nazified Fernsprecher Bücher of the erstwhile delightful city of Berlin. But I have been often enough in those distant towns to know what terrific difficulties arise when one has to revaluate the international alphabet into the local equivalents of Archimedes, Bologna’s, and Pterodactyli. And when one thinks of the chances of error in the regions where extra h’ s are so liberally sprinkled over the current vernacular, then one simply shivers in one’s sandals. I, for one, shall never forget the days when I lived in Veere and had to listen to telegraph clerks growing despondent when their French or German or Dutch or English colleagues failed to understand that the name was really very simple, ‘V as in Frederick’ and ‘double E as in ’edge-og.‘

Now it would undoubtedly not be an easy matter to establish an international code of alphabet revaluations, but the thing could undoubtedly be done when left to the care and attention of those sound specialists who during the last fifty years have been developed by our different telegraph and telephone companies. There must be a way of re-creating the old alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, into terms that shall be as clearly understandable to the ears of the Afghan as to those of the white-robed Zanzibarian.

III

And what a chance for an international conference that could actually accomplish something really concrete!

The League of Nations has never been very much of a success because it invariably is called upon to deal with problems that cause such terrific backfires of national indignation and international suspicion that an adjournment sine die is the only way in which the honorable delegates have ever been able to prevent an outbreak of another world war. Disarmament conferences have become such a stale joke that even burlesque comedians are warned off that particular topic.

But everybody is well disposed toward the alphabet. Brother Hitler, of course, might feel slightly suspicious of it, since it is of such undisputed Semitic origin. He might even want to replace it by the runic system that goes back to the days when his ancestors were living in their mud hovels of the swamps between the Elbe and the Oder. We might, however, pacify him by throwing in a couple of ‘ urrs as in aurochs’ and ‘elgrs as in elk.’ And anyway, that would be something for my International Committee to worry about. I am merely the Moses who points in the general direction of the Promised Land of alphabetic simplicity. The International Committee will have to play the rôle of Aaron and get us there.

If the Atlantic will print this appeal to common sense and will endorse my humble suggestion, it will render a service unto mankind that will reverberate unto the utmost corners and crevices of even the Pacific and will undoubtedly lead to several new subscriptions from Tristan da Cunha, as well as Pitcairn Island.