Dear Wordwind: I put my foot in my mouth on your "Pronunciation" thread earlier today, and I am just stopping by to apologize officially. I am sometimes confused with the General who leads your war effort. That is certainly unfair to him. For one thing, he has a masterful command of all 26 letters of the alphabet while there are only 6 letters in my little squadron (and one of them is AWOL most of the time). Furthermore, I can't even string a single word together, apart from the acronym "iou" which is something of a liability. So, I offer my abject apologies to the real General, as well as to you and anyone who visited your thread before I was able to make my retreat from my dim-witted pun. Before I return to my duties in the alphabet, may I explain that altho I come from a country which supports the American war effort fully, my country isn't on the front-lines as you are, and we haven't got any Generals at all. In fact, our military capability is about as limited as my vocabulary. I know the rest of the alphabet will expect me to run the gauntlet so I must be running off. For whatever its worth, I think all posters are created equally as well. We have had a few dust-ups in the alphabet just like the ones I have seen here at AWADtalk. Actually my cousin George wrote a book about it called "Alphabet Farm". Anyway, we solved the problem by electing a few capital letters at the upper end of the alphabet to protect those at the lower end. You don't have a whole lot of friends to turn to when you're at the bottom. The ones in between can pretty much fend for themselves. They don't feel like strangers. Of course, that's not really any of my business and I've got problems enough of my own right now.
