Government reform. One small step for man. One giant leap to reform society.

This is a modest proposal for those in the South Dakota legislature and administration who are advocating for regulatory reform and for the active reorganization or purging of government regulators. The current state administration wants to ”scrub each agency.” I would prefer that legislators devoted themselves to contemplative studies, but they are men and women of action. Good government eliminates, reduces, conserves and throws out things. The perspective of legislators is often to leave some things alone and eliminate much of the rest. Understanding these character attributes I provide a recommendation for lawmakers.

Reforming government is a big lift. These are high and mighty things. But charity starts at home. And reform starts at home. It is better to first start correcting the fundamentals of society. Then move on to bigger targets. Legislators must associate with quality ideas if they wish their reputation to be esteemed in the future. I submit that legislators should first reform the principles of communication. They could revise the English alphabet for the betterment of mankind and, by doing this, simplify communications in the bargain. History will well compensate them for the effort.

Written English is strongly resistant to change. Yet reform is do-able. Lawmakers should change society’s way of communicating. Society will be better for it. Letters of the alphabet that don’t have enough jobs should not be paid equally with other letters. Affirmative action for letters is unacceptable protocol when dealing with communication. A fastidious reformer will happily throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The letter “y” needs to be thrown out of the alphabet. The “y” of modern English did not exist in Old English which is otherwise known as Anglo Saxon. One writer suggests that when they were later printing Old English old printing presses didn’t have a “þ” character, so they substituted the more modern “y” instead. In Old English the letter “y” as written was used for a type of sound no longer used in Modern English, something like our modern “th”. I personally have had trouble with the letter “y”. As a student I used to spell guy as “gi”.

The letter “y” is out of place and unwelcome. “Y” is a modern immigrant. It is probably an illegal one at that. I don’t know if it has a green card or other papers justifying its existence here in the English language. “Y” should be deported.

“Y” is one of the letters that occurs less in use than other letters of the alphabet. Morse code was designed so that the length of each letter symbol is approximately inverse to the frequency of appearance of the letter in the English language. The Morse code for “y” is a lengthy symbol of dots and dashes because it is less used. Is “y” a consonant or a vowel? This is a grammatical dilemma. It would be easy for “y” to get in trouble by choosing the wrong public bathroom under proposed South Dakota gender laws.

I for one don’t want the government to crush my proposed reform movement. Had this reform occurred earlier, I would have been rid of many of those damned writing and vocabulary tests that haunted my time as a student. To discard what is unwanted and retain what is needed will be a good day’s work for lawmakers.

David Ganje. David Ganje of Ganje Law Office practices in the area of natural resources, environmental and commercial law. The website is Lexenergy.net