The Problem with the Letter E

There is a lot of hype about global warming these days, and everyone is pointing fingers: car emissions, industrial waste, factory smog - you name it. But the real culprit is easily overlooked, and is used unknowingly by all of us - each and every day. It is the letter "e".

"E" is the most commonly used letter in the English language - statistically, 12.7% all characters are the letter "e" ¹. For the most commonly used letter, "e" is also one of the widest; physically that is.

In Times New Roman, a commonly used font, in both upper and lower cases the letter "e" is two-and-a-half times wider than the letter "j".

However, the letter "j" only constitutes 0.2% of all letters. Do the math* - If we switch the letters "j" and "e", we could reduce the length of all material printed by 5%.

While this may not sound like a lot, the United States alone used 26,935,000 tons of printing and writing paper as of 2000², and uses more and more each year.

That 5% equates to 1,346,000 tons of paper.

Twenty-four trees go into each ton of paper³, for a total of thirty-two million trees each year.

Not to mention the forty thousand tons of air pollution produced turning those trees to paper.

Shorter documents also mean faster print times, lower ink consumption, smaller energy requirements.

Although their may be slight confusion at first, switching the letter "e" with "j" is the simplest way to reduce dependency on foreign oil, slow deforestation, and ultimately combat global warming.

Bj surj to sprjad thj word!