All right; I catch the grin, and cheerfully grin back. The business of a scholar (Emerson's "man thinking", Plato's [Greek: philosophos]) is to take as long views as he can; in this case, to look far beyond the possibilities of my life-time. The more you people with the shorter views, as I venture to think them, agitate for and practise each little partial solution, the more you help on the threshing out which must go on for many years before we can arrive at any general solution. So, more power to your elbow! Meantime my own spelling will continue to be--like the conventional spelling of the printers of today--a hodge-podge of inconsistencies, quite indefensible on rational grounds, and varying with circumstances. Of course the rational way to spell _people_ is _piipl_, or _pipl_. Which we think is an attempt to bolster up a lost cause. From another reader: Your closing sentence in the first number of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW states with a most distressing combination of vowels and outlandish collocation of consonants that you would like to hear from your readers on the subject.... Z is not a pretty letter, and to see it so frequently usurping the place so long held by s is far from gratifying to the eye.... Suppose you establish to your own satisfaction a method for assigning sound values; how will you reach the differences in vowel sounds that prevail in the United States? The New Englander's mouthing of _a_ differs from that of the Northern New Yorker, and both differ greatly from that of the Southerner--indeed, in the different Southern States there is variation.... At first I was interested in simplified spelling, but the eccentricities developed by its advocates alienated me long since, so I beg of you, drop it. From our answer: I delayed thanking you for your letter of the 29th until there should be time for you to see the April-June number. I hope you are feeling better now. If you are not, I do not think I can do much to console you, because when a man has been irritated into that position where the alleged beauty of a letter counts in so serious a question, he is probably beyond mortal help. I have no desire "to reach the differences in vowel sounds that prevail in the United States". There is not much difference among cultivated people. Probably a fair standard would be the conversation at the Century Club, where there are visitors from Maine to California, and hardly any noticeable difference in pronunciation. There seems to be no disagreement among authorities that a simplified spelling would save a great deal of time among children....