Why Y is a Vowel and a Consonant

I will answer for you this evening one of the greatest riddles ever given to man by pomp and circumstance. The next few paraphrases shall reveal why the letter Y is considered both a consonant and a vowel. But first things first, the future, or present depending on your point of view.

When people learn to read they’re told that every word consists of vowels and consonants. That no word in the English language is nothing but vowels and no word is only consonants. Eventually we figure out the exception to the rule. Usually in Gym glass. We bring this fact to the attention of our teacher who reminds us that the word is actually an abbreviation for the word gymnasium “which we can both tell has not only one vowel but three: ‘A’, ‘I’, ‘U’,” then he or she proceeds to remind you that abbreviations are not words which is why you can’t use them in Scrabble. You try to remind me of the time they used the word scuba in a Scrabble game because this teacher happens to be a family friend and on one occasion you played Scrabble against them. “Scuba’s an acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus”. Aren’t acronyms abbreviations and if Scrabble recognizes scuba as a word why not gym. And if gym is recognized as a word in of itself wouldn’t that mean there’re words without vowels.”
“Well that’s a very good question.” Suddenly he or she jumps up from their chair and tells you there phone rang even though you didn’t hear anything. “Trust me it went off,” and then they leave the room. Oftentimes enough you don’t need to go into the scuba/scrabble example. The word gym being short for gymnasium is more than enough. Your faith in the linguistic dogma of vowels and consonants is once again restored (in fact one could argue it is a little stronger because it survived scrutiny). You go about the rest of the day until you come across another problem with “the dogma”. Usually in music class. While you’re pretending to play the trumpet and resist the urge to tell the tuba player that the tuba is the cymbal of The Brass World, as that is in the percussion, you realize that there is another word without a vowel. But unlike gym it doesn’t come with an easy way out for the teacher. You return to the teacher during his lunch break and ask him, while he’s eating fast food, “What about the word rhythm? It’s got no vowels.” The teacher might answer, “The word rhythm is Greek and short for rythmos, which contains one vowel: an O. Man you’re pretty smart. Have you considered talking to the principal to see if you can skip a grade?”
“No, I haven’t,” you say and just after you decide to leave you realize something while casually glancing at him eating a part of his meal. “What about the word Fry? There’s no vowels there.”
“Yes but ‘fry’ is short for frying.”
“Doesn’t an ‘ing’ at the end of a word only mean it’s the present participle. Wouldn’t that mean that the word the actual word is fry and not just a longer word built from F-R-Y.”
“That is a very intelligent question but my phone is ringing. I must see to it before I can see to you.”
“I see it on the desk, charging. It’s not doing anything…but charging, I guess.”
“So it is,” he says, “Very perspective of you to notice that. Like I was saying if you should talk to the principal I could put in a very good letter of recommendation. In fact if we talk to the principal or the superintendent today I’m sure we could get you into the fourth grade first thing in the morning.”
“Today’s Friday. That would make tomorrow Saturday. Wouldn’t school be closed?”
“You know how they say there’s time better than now. Well I happen to think that starting tomorrow is highly underated.”
The kid, realizing something right there and then says, “Are you just saying this stuff tom avoid answering my questions?”
“Avoid your question? I would never dream of it. So how about we talk to the principal about getting in the fourth grade right nowish.”
“Yeah we can but can we just answer my question.”
“Fine,” he says while chewing on a fry and sipping his soda, “I’ll answer your question. Sometimes Y can be a vowel to.”
“But what about the word ‘you’. If ‘Y’s’ a vowel that means that with the word ‘you’ is a word that has no consents and I learned in class that every word has a consonant in it too.”
“Well in the case of ‘you’ and words like it y is a consonant too. In fact it’s more a vowel than a consonant than a vowel but it’s a both regardless.”
“Why?”

This was an answer the teacher did not have for the pupil. But I do. Now we travel to the past, or the future, depending on your point of view, to find the answer. In the year 2067 a series of government documents were declassified. This in itself would not be particularly important if not for one little fact. Unfortunately copies of these declassified documents found there ways into the hands of a very clever Elf named Randy who used his magical powers to break into one of the leading archives in this future word, which to him is the present and then used his power to send himself several decades into the past. He gave these documents to several of his contacts in the past, bloggers mostly. One blogger named Opium Android posted the following paraphrase of the documents contents. Because of the actions of one renegade elf from the future with way too many powers and the assistance of his associates we can finally know why Y is both a vowel and a consonant. Here is the story:

It happened sometime in the 1950s. A teacher was teaching her students about vowels. On the previous day a student was eating French fries during lunch, trying to ignore a stomach cramp while playing the saxophone in 6th period and visiting his grandparent’s grave after school, where the groundskeeper of the cemetery, a stranger to this kid, for no apparent reason says to him, while he's mourning, “It should have been you.” This student’s mother tries to assault him with her purse but the groundskeeper is able to run away as fast as his feet will carry him. It was while recollecting these otherwise obscure events of yesterday when he realized something. “FRY. RHYTHM. CRYPT. These words don’t have vowels in them.” He raises his hand and when the teacher calls on him she soon regrets her decision when her student says, “Umm. What about the words fry, rhythm and crypt. They don’t have any vowels in them. They’re all consonants.”

On the spot she improvises an explanation that the whole class quickly realizes is false and something made up on the spot. When five consecutive students each ask her progressively harder questions for her to answer she uses her mouth to fake the sound of an alarm going off and says, “Well that’s the bell. You better get to your next class.” One of the students reminds her that “we still have twenty-seven minutes left”. Suddenly the teacher says, “Oh my god. It’s a fire alarm. We better go outside because this might not be a drill.” She quickly runs out of the classroom and towards the faculty room to hide. She hides there for a moment, assuming she’s alone, until a few of the teachers call out, “Mrs. Walter. What are you doing?”“Hiding.”
“From what? Why would you be hiding?”
“One of the students asked me about the grammatical rule of words always containing vowels and consnants. He brought up the words Fry, Rhythm and Crypt.”
“My lord,” one of the teachers said, “Well it was wise for you to leave the students alone and come here without saying a word. That was thinking.”
“Actually I did say something.”
“What? The fire alarm business, right.”
“Before then.”
“What could you have possibly said before then?”
“I said the whole vowel, consonant thing was because of something Aristotle said.”
“Something Aristotle said. You foolish strumpet do you know what you’ve done. You’ve just opened a modern day’s Pandora’s box but unlike that one ours doesn’t contain hope. We are done for. The very fabric of our reality shall now come undone when it was locked into irreconcilable paradox and causality contradicts reality so much that it negates it. You have doomed us all.”
“In my defense, what was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to say?"”
“You were supposed to give them all detention and perpetuate the myth of a permanent record should inquire any further into a question you cannot answer. Of course you don’t tell them the part about not being able to answer their question but you still threaten them with reprimand none-the-less. Now in your sloppy discipline you have doomed us all,” then he monologues, “You foolish, foolish girl straight out of university. It was certainly a dangerous thing for the superintendent to believe that maybe women could teach English to students instead of just home economics and art with a component of crafts. This is what happens when school districts elect eye candy for teachers over educators. If this vowel business is brought up at the next PTA meeting we are done for”
Another teacher cries out in despair, “What will we do? I don’t want the universe to unravel. I like the universe. It’s where I keep all my stuff.”

A different teacher says, “I don’t think reality itself will come undone but certainly the education system, through endless reforms that will take the soul out of its body and reduce its limbs to hunks of liability, will. In addition to demanding our resurrections they will probably ask us to die in the manner of Bushido, or perhaps we may spare ourselves of this and allow us to elect to drink Hemlock instead. That is if we found ourselves among a compassionate jury of course,” he turns to the woman teacher and says, “Aristotle, really? What were you thinking?”
The last teacher of the bunch to reveal their opinion says, “I recommend we find new professions before all of this hits the fan. I myself have always secretly desired to become a long shoresman working in Alaska or perhaps I could just as easily relocate myself to Massachusetts and Maine and become a sailor there just as easily there as in Juneau or Seattle."
“Our hope is lost,” said the first teacher to be upset, “We will soon be seen as disposable and possibly replaced by a computer one day. You may laugh now but one day we will be replaced by machines. Machines that are capable of teaching our children about consonants and vowels and punctuation; the functions of conjunctions and all manner of grammatical relevance. I feel that all hope must now be abandoned at the entrance of our own inferno, Dante style, in the most unfunny comedy ever written.”
“Perhaps all is not lost,” one of them says, “I have a friend who has connections to powerful people. Connections so close to the president that they could scratch his nose for him. I will give him a call.”.
“Pray that he answers or else may God have mercy on us all.”

Later that day the teacher called his friend in Washington. The friend in Washington ran from one end of The White House to the other until he found his way in The Oval Office while President Eisenhower was meeting with a trusted advisor for a daily brief. The President noticed this man’s apparent shortness of breath and asked him about it. This was the answer he gave, “Mister President I have news for you that is of the utmost importance.”
“Does it have something to do with the commies.”
“It’s bigger than that, sir.”
“What could be bigger than that?”
He explains the situation to President Eisenhower, who after his jaw drops in disbelief says, “My god. I’ll put my best men on it. We will not let any resource this country has at its disposal go unused. If we must incur Armageddon just to discover a solution to this problem than I would say that Armageddon under such circumstances would be most welcome.”

A few days later after the President consulted his top advisers including a new one named Randy who was “vertically challenged” and had pointy ears. It was he, the time traveling elf who released declassified documents from the future into a time when they were still classified who recommended the following solution. “They say you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You know what I say: Why have one cook when you can have two? If you got two cakes there’re no problems with having or eating. You can do both. I say we do that for the letter Y. I say we call it both a vowel and a consonant. Problem solved.”

One of the president’s advisors says, “He might be short and possibly evil, imbued with Satanic powers, but he does have a very good suggestion.”
“So it’s settled,” President Eisenhower, “From here on in Y is both a vowel and a consonant. This way all problems are resolved. Get the news out through the usual channels. Let this news leak like no news has ever leaked before.”
“Yes, Mister President,” said Randy the Elf, “we’ll get right on it.” Then he walked out of The Oval Office, into the hallway and teleported himself into the future to give a series of declassified documents to a blogger named Opium Android.