Jul 7, 2017 4 min read

Here’s what it’s like to be a writer without a z. It is harder than you think.

This all started last spring when my beloved Mac laptop caught a virus, a briefly devastating professional development that I wrote about in this column. The virus was a so-called ransomware, a charming and deliberate glitch that hijacks your computer and then asks for money to release it. Refusing to play that game, I ditched the glitched laptop and got a new one, a far inferior HP.

My family tends to tear into and start using new things before really looking at the instruction book, and that’s how I approached my new laptop. I’m sure I missed a few important suggestions, but it’s doubtful that my current dilemma would have been prevented by reading the instructions.

Specifically, my z key is stuck. I can hit it and nudge it and it will not deliver. I discovered this when my online bank would not accept my password, a version of which I’d been using for years. Only after checking both my hidden password notes and my sanity, I discovered that my memory was not, in fact, decaying but that the z in my password was not being recorded when I typed it.

Now, you are probably thinking I have some cute password like zowie or zigzag or columnwiz, and you are wrong. My password is a somewhat common everyday word that happens to contain a z, followed by a cryptic sequence of numbers.

Thinking that some goo had accumulated around the z key, I blew on it, but that didn’t work. Next, I attacked the key with a pair of tweezers, but nope. I got some of that canned air used to chase the goo from computer keyboards, but still no z.

This has forced me to avoid some topics: my love of zebras for example; why I failed at Zumba class; what it was like growing up in the kind of family that owns a zither; and why I have chosen not to stockpile toilet paper to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. And my annual “What am I supposed to do with all this zucchini?” column will have to wait. I’m just glad it’s not my o key.

And I know what that’s like, sort of. When I was starting college, my dad found an old and neglected manual typewriter. He spiffed it up and that’s what I used to write all my papers during four years of college. As the years of my pounding away went on, the o became sharp; by junior year, that o became a cookie cutter, poking a hole through the paper every time I struck it. I turned in speeches, short stories, essays and journalism papers that looked like keypunch cards. I emerged from all-nighters covered in the snow of a thousand vowels.

The dictionary has almost 3,000 words that start with z. Some of my favorites are zowie, zillionaire and Zamboni. My favorite color is azure. My new favorite word is zwodder. Look it up.

And how, you wonder, am I writing this column without my z? I’m using someone else’s computer until I get my z fixed. And so, since I’m here and I can, I’ll tell you about the 22-letter word that starts with z. It’s zenzizenzizenzizenzike, a word used when describing a number multiplied to the 16th power. Typing that would probably kill my sad little HP laptop. But really, how many of us would ever actually type it?

Zilch.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.