15 Hilarious Predictions About the Year 2020 Made Long Ago

C, X, and Q will not be part of the alphabet.

When you’re curious about the future of language, you probably should ask someone other than an engineer about it.

And yet, that’s what Ladies’ Home Journal did in 1900, asking John Elfreth Watkins Jr., the curator of mechanical technology at the Smithsonian Institution, for his educated guesses about the 21st century.

The man of science had no love for what he considered extraneous letters, and he boldly predicted that by the 2000s, “there will be no C, X, or Q in our everyday alphabet.

They will be abandoned because unnecessary.” Instead, Watkins wrote, we’d be spelling mostly by sound and would only communicate with “condensed words expressing condensed ideas.” So, to our 2020 friends, we say, “Me happy good, hi!”