Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn Read Free Book Online

Council Assembly has been based upon supposition—upon meandering hypothesis and amorphous conjecture.
    It is none of these things.
    The signs have been presented to us, and while it took us a while to ascertain the desired course rising from their assignment, we now, we are happy to say, and with only temporary delay, securelygrasp and freely endorse without temperage these pathfinders dropped, literally, at our feet.
    For those of you who desire explication, we offer the following ten salients:
      1. Nollop was a man of words.
      2. We are a people of words.
      3. All that we are, we owe to Nollop.
      4. His will be done.
      5. We have become unfortunate victims of our own complacency.
      6. Complacency is a destructive force, capable of ending through invidious stagnationality all that is good which we have created for ourselves here.
      7. The falling tiles can represent only one thing: a challenge—a summons to bettering our lot in the face of such deleterious complacency, and in the concomitant presence of false contentment and rank self-indulgence.
      8. There is no room for alternative interpretation.
      9. Interpretation of events in any other way represents heresy.
    10. Heretics will be punished, as was, for example, Mr. Nollop’s saucy stenographer, who was cashiered for flippantly announcing to her employer the ease with which she could, herself, create such a sentence as his.
    Those of you who see undue cruelty in the penalties meted out for speaking or writing the forbidden letters should make note of the following three points:
      1. Adhering to the commandments of Nollop leaves no room for fear of punishment or forfeiture. (He who walks in the light has no reason to fear the darkness.)
      2. There is no such thing as accident or misspeak, only grossly underapplied discoursal perspicacity, with unguarded exposureto distractional digression. (A lighted path is clear. There is no reason, save mischief or inattention, to stray into the darkness.)
      3. The severity of punishment is an irrelevant issue, given the opportunity to avoid punishment altogether. (Keep to the path to avoid what is promised to be a broken and jagged shoulder.)
    Returning to the saucy secretary: she was given fair warning by Nollop that her insubordinate speech would not be tolerated. That one of such intellectual inferiority could ever in a lifetime duplicate the work of Nollop was unfathomable, her claim hypercomical. Nollop said as much, even challenged the pert stenographer to come up with a sentence of her own measuring thirty-five letters or less and containing all of the letters of the alphabet.
    She tried.
    She failed.
    In fact, the best that she could muster was a short anecdote about an imaginary animal park in which the occupants revolted by exchanging their stripes and spots. It ran precisely 289 letters.
    She used the word
yak
three times.
    The secretary, we might further add, was never able to come up with a sentence matching Nollop’s because it simply cannot be done. This is what has given Nollop his preeminence. Omnipotent. Omniscient. Omniglorious.
    Praise Nollop.
    And honor his wishes by removing “J” with jubilation.
    Sincerely
,
    Your High Council
    Gordon Willingham
    La Greer Houston
    Harton Mangrove
    Rederick Lyttle
    A. Plastman

The * uick brown fox * umps over the la * y dog
     
    CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA U.S.A.
    Monday, September 11
    Dear Mr. Minnow Pea,
    I am in receipt of your letter regarding my order of miniature moonshine vessels. (Note that I have no interest in violating your Island Council’s three recent statutes regarding alphabetical elision, and so we will continue to refer to the vessels as, simply, vessels.)
    Given the marketability of your previous consignments, the 50 figure is much too low. Please deliver to my warehouse double that amount by December 1—in time for the Christmas market—and I will pay you an additional $5.00 per vessel, with a bonus of $550.00 for