Wednesday, March 11, 2009
‘U’ taken off the endangered character list
Five years after the Government vowed to take the Letter ‘U’ off the endangered character list, the first crop of lower case ‘u’s are due to be released into the wild this April.
The delisting, which has been supported by environment minister Ben Bradshaw, represents an official recognition of the population boom of letter u’s in the United Kingdom since 1995, more than tripling in the last 15 years.
The letter U was added to the endangered character list in the early eighties, after more than three decades of decline. The fashion in the sixties of omitting the letter in favour of brevity was widely condemned at the time, most famously when Honor Blackman was attacked by pro-vowel protesters outside BBC Television Centre. Although a petition was sent to 10 Downing street, it wasn’t until 1982 that Margaret Thatcher bowed to public pressure, and added the letter ‘u’ to the list of officially endangered characters, along with Q, X and Pi.
This April, the first u’s to be born in captivity, will travel from Stonebridge Inner City Farm in Nottingham to Dorset, where they will be released into their natural habitat, and encouraged to breed with the indigenous population of wild u’s found in the area.
Plans to introduce the u’s to America have stalled.
The delisting, which has been supported by environment minister Ben Bradshaw, represents an official recognition of the population boom of letter u’s in the United Kingdom since 1995, more than tripling in the last 15 years.
The letter U was added to the endangered character list in the early eighties, after more than three decades of decline. The fashion in the sixties of omitting the letter in favour of brevity was widely condemned at the time, most famously when Honor Blackman was attacked by pro-vowel protesters outside BBC Television Centre. Although a petition was sent to 10 Downing street, it wasn’t until 1982 that Margaret Thatcher bowed to public pressure, and added the letter ‘u’ to the list of officially endangered characters, along with Q, X and Pi.
This April, the first u’s to be born in captivity, will travel from Stonebridge Inner City Farm in Nottingham to Dorset, where they will be released into their natural habitat, and encouraged to breed with the indigenous population of wild u’s found in the area.
Plans to introduce the u’s to America have stalled.
// posted by Chase @ 3/11/2009 11:45:00 am 
