Quote - Yes you can give it a shortcut. Hit x.... brings up the delete menu.... right click vertices.... this brings up a menu that will let you set up a shortcut... like shift+X. Make sure you don't assign it a shortcut already in use. Unless it's something you don't use much.

That's fantastic!  Thank you very much, Cybermonk.  That saves me a lot of time.

Also, while I have your ear, is there a way to change the behavior of the way we DEselect objects?  Instead of always reaching for the keyboard, I sometimes think it would be convenient just to mouseclick somewhere on an empty space in the scene to deselect an object, as is common in so many other modeling software applications.

When I first began learning how to model, I found it very useful to use the hotkey A, or Shift click to deselect the object I was working on at the moment in Blender, because it reduced the frequency of selection errors when you had more then a few objects in the scene.  But as time went on, I found myself wishing for a way to deselect my current object with a simple mouse gesture instead.  After all, we use our mouse to select objects in the scene, so why not also deselect the object in the same manner, and reassign the Grab Move tool, or just disable it?  I barely use the grab move to make object translations, even to this day.

I'm sure now, after customizing Blender so much lately, that there is a way to do that in the User Preferences panel, but I can't seem to locate it.  I see where we can change the behavior of our right-click object selection (I have mine set to Left-Click), but nothing for deselecting an object, except to change hotkeys.

Thanks in advance!