May 1, 2015

From “Punishment of the Welsh Pun Miners” by Newnum Shipler

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The great Welsh Pun Miners’ Strike of 1926 started at the Ygnnygyg Mine when a poorly placed Oxford comma support collapsed and buried a passageway under a pile of participles, clauses, and split infinitives.

Management was accused of hoarding their supply of pun-destroying grandmothers and other heavy excavating equipment, judging the trapped miners to be not worth rescuing. When the last gerunds were finally cleared away by work crews, it was found that all but one of them had died of vowel poisoning–especially damning as all the pun mines’ vowels except fom of the Ys were designated for export. The sole survivor, having been forced to subsist on stale humor for nearly a week, was left mad with pun-lust and eventually killed himself by hanging participle.

When the Ygnnygyg Mine operators refused the miners’ request for additional commas and vowel filters on breathing masks, violence broke out. Arming themselves with em dashes, semicolons, and ampersands, the miners blocked the clauses leading into the mine until their demands were met. The pun supply throughout Great Britain dried up, a shortage felt particularly keenly in bohemian and pun-happy London, where puns served with absinthe were all the rage at the time.

Eventually, the management brought in scabs and strikebreakers from Greece. Not speaking English, and using a different script, they were unaffected by the sarcasm, wit, pathos, and punctuation hurled at them by the strikers. By January of 1927 the mines were in operation again and the unrest was crushed.

It would take another ten years, until the explosive simile chain reaction at Metaphor Mine in Berkshire, for British law to begin changing to protect the lot of the humble vocabulary miners.

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December 4, 2014

From “A Brief History of Blood Vowels” by Dr. Ivy Slothower

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What do many words using Y and W instead of proper vowels have in common? They’re Welsh, of course. Wales was systematically looted of its vowels after its conquest to feed the English hunger for unnecessary vowelery after the French fashion. That’s right, the “u” in “colour” doesn’t just make its natural pronunciation “coh-lure,” it’s also a blood vowel stolen from a people so vowel-poor that they had to scrape by with Y and W.

Yes, the vowel-mines of Wales were long the envy of English monarchs, as England itself exhausted its own vowel reserves during the ongoing and debilitating Shouting Wars against France. The Welsh at first were able to simply sell their vowels to an England anxious to be able to match French words like “eau” or “nouveau.” English looting and purchase of vowels was so prevalent that even the last leader of Wales, Llywelyn, was forced to make do with a single vowel in his name while his English conqueror, Edward, has two.

England is not alone in the exploitative harvesting of vowels. French and Italian vowels mines, long the most productive in the world, had all but run out by the 1700s, forcing them to look elsewhere. For a time the French were able to import vowels taken from North America by force or trade, but with the cession of their vowel-rich territory of Quebec, they were forced to look elsewhere. That somewhere was Poland, which was rich in vowel mines but had been undergoing a language crisis since looting the Ottoman camp at the Siege of Vienna, as Ottoman Turkish was at the time written without vowels altogether.

As a result, Poland was partitioned, with the lion’s share of the territory going to the Russian Empire. With no need for Poland’s Latin vowels, having their own Cyrillic vowel mines deep in the Urals, the Russians instead exploited Polish vowels for export, selling them to the French and Italians. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia to guarantee his vowel supply, as he needed eight vowels to say his own name alone, and a steady supply of Polish blood vowels were guaranteed in the later French-Russian alliance. All the while, Poland was so looted of vowels that they had to make do with words like “wszystko” and “cześć.” The downtrodden Polish made creative use of diacritics to make up for their looted syllabary, but their vowel mines were ultimately entirely depleted.

Of course, Americans are not blameless. The constant insertion of British-style blood vowels into words to make them seem sophisticated is a constant bane, and many of the blood vowels so used now come from Africa, where once vowel-rich places like Ouagadougou are now exploited for foreign sale by warlords.

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