I am fascinated by your replies, Terry. I mean it.

When a reader sees "27th Letter of the Alphabet", then I was not expecting anyone to say "Oh, wow, I did not know there was a 27th letter to the alphabet."

I expect them to respond like normal people, saying "Yeah, right!"

The attraction of the title is found with the word "Magic". A promise is called out together with this untruthful 27th letter of the alphabet.

I deliver that magic.

It turns out that the 27th letter (which does not exist) is called out with the spacebar on a typewriter. The word could not be more appropriate: SPACE bar.

Yet that is not the magic, Terry. The magic is that we have 26 letters and can communicate using them.

There is nothing natural about writing language using letters. Each and every letter, each and every word is artificial. And yet we can have meaning come across nevertheless.

The underlying magic of this specific magic is that space allowed us to come up with something artificial, and it is the space to invent something artificial that can be used to communicate that is truly magical.

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I know you like language, so you must agree with me that there is indeed magic delivered. If not by me in this article, then by mankind capable of using artificial means to communicate.

The decimal system is perhaps more obvious in its delivery, using that same kind of magic. We have:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

The beauty is that we can call this entire set out as 1. And yet that would be a fallacy, a contradiction.

The 1 to call out the entire set is not the same 1 as the 1 used in the decimal system itself. And yet we pretend as if it is all 1 and the same.

Compare these two versions of 1 with the third version of 1 used in the binary system: just a bunch of 1s and 0s and nothing else.

Three times we are using a 1 that is not identical to the other 1s.

I won't explain it further, unless you need me to. I think you can see the magic of numbers already.

Our brains are fascinating. We conjure fake realities in artificial format, and then we pretend that all that information is real. It is the other person who acknowledges that the information is understood as intended. It is the other person who declares the information was received well, or in your case, was not received well.

Next, you are using the same artificial system to let me know how you feel cheated by my words. You see the magic of that?

There are no real words. We conjure up systems and pretend them to be real. Yet the true basis of all these system is space. The space to do so.

I'll cherish this conversation for a long time, Terry. It is rare for a writer to get feedback like this; I used it some to improve the article, but I'll just save it for my enjoyment and wonder. I am fascinated by the way your brain works.