CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
"Ye fright the nightly wand’rer’s way / Wi’ eldritch croon." By Thomas Landseer, from Tam o’Shanter and Souter Jonny, a Poem, by Robert Burns, London, 1830.
We can now confirm that the following is very literally true:
"The writer of a dictionary rises every morning like the sun to move past some little star in his zodiac; a new letter is to him a new year's festival, the conclusion of the old one a harvest-home; and, since after each capital letter the whole alphabet follows successively, the author on his paper may perhaps frequently celebrate on one and the same day a Sunday, a Lady-day, and a Crispin's holiday." —Jean Paul Richter, Levana