CHAPTER 1

ALPHA TO OMEGA

A FEW YEARS AGO, in the Frankfurt airport on the way home from a memorable stay in Greece, I bought a copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, which includes her essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” I had just enough cash in euros for a slim paperback and a giant beer. If not, I would have gone for the beer. I was thirsty, and this was Germany, and I already had a copy of The Common Reader at home. But I was impressed that anything by Virginia Woolf was considered airport reading.

I assumed that “On Not Knowing Greek” was about how Woolf’s father had forbidden her to study Greek the way my father had refused to let me study Latin. I pictured young Virginia Stephen sulking in a room of her own, an indecipherable alphabet streaming through her consciousness, while her father and her brother, downstairs in the library, feasted on Plato and Aristotle.

Well, apparently I had read only the title of “On Not Knowing Greek.” Of course Virginia Woolf knew Greek. The essay is a paean to Greek. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an editor and critic, and Virginia started studying ancient Greek for fun, at home, when she was about fifteen. She took classes at King’s College (in the Ladies’ Department) while her brother Thoby was studying at Cambridge. Though she was not an academic, she had private tutorials for several years with Miss Janet Case, who, as a student at Cambridge, had played Athena in an 1885 production of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, a performance she was remembered for all her life. Together, Miss Case and Miss Stephen (as she was then) read Aeschylus. For Woolf, at the time she published her essay, in 1925, “not knowing Greek” meant that it was impossible truly to know what the playwright meant, because we don’t know what the ancient language sounded like. “We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English,” she writes. In the Agamemnon, the opening utterance of Cassandra—the seer, brought to Mycenae from Troy as war booty, whose fate it was never to be believed—is not just untranslatable but unintelligible: ότοτοτοȋ is not even a word, just inarticulate syllables that represent a barbarian princess’s howl of despair. “The naked cry,” Woolf calls it—perhaps onomatopoeia for a convulsive sob. Both the chorus and Clytemnestra compare Cas sandra’s lament to birdsong. The best an English translation can do is to transliterate the Greek letters—“Otototoi”—or go with something like “Ah me!” or “Alas!” Woolf writes that it is “useless . . . to read Greek in translations.” Virginia Woolf did not know Greek the way bees do not know pollen. Compared with her, I was a child with a set of wooden blocks that had the letters of the alphabet printed on them, along with apples and bananas. Ότοτοτοȋ!

Fortunately, I like blocks, and I love the alphabet. I have a chunky wooden puzzle of the English alphabet, acquired while I was in graduate school, which I meant to give to some child but have kept for myself all these years. I have been known to polish the letters with linseed oil and a soft cloth. I also have the Greek letters in the form of an alphabet book for children, by Eleni Geroulanou, which I bought at the Benaki Museum in Athens, one of the best museums in Greece. It is like the Morgan Library in New York or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in that it houses the collection of an individual with a good eye and ample means—in this case, the Alexandrian Greek Antonis Benakis, who donated his holdings and his family’s house to the state in 1931. Instead of apples and bananas and cats, the book’s illustrations are of pieces from the collection of the Benaki: alpha is for αεροπλάνο (airplane), beta is for βιβλίο (book), gamma is for γοργόνα (gorgon). I meant to give that to a child, too, at some point, but it cleaves to me.

Anyone who loves language loves the alphabet. Children have a natural affinity for it, and are helped along by such letter-delicacies as Alpha-Bits cereal and alphabet soup. Do you remember how the letters of the alphabet formed a frieze over the blackboard at school when you were a child? Or maybe they danced along the walls, just below the ceiling, each capital paired with its offspring. I used to think of them as mothers and babies. The Big B and the small b were content to go in the same direction, but the small d faced down the Big D. It was defiant—a word I knew from an early age, because my mother frequently said of me, “She’s a defiant one.”

The word “letter,” as in a letter of the alphabet, is also the word for something built of letters, as in a letter home or a letter from a friend, and it is the root of the word literature, which is, ultimately, built of letters of the alphabet. To be lettered is to be literate, and to have letters after your name is to have received a higher education. Children learn to sing the alphabet forwards and backwards. The alphabet is the greatest invention of humankind, and even has a spark of the divine: it gave us the written word, which gave us the means to communicate with both the past and the future. Write it down, we say, when we want to remember something. Write it down and make it stick.

There are other forms of written communication—the Egyptians had hieroglyphs, the Minoans had Linear A to keep track of their food stores, the Native Americans had pictographs, tweeters and texters have emojis and emoticons—but there has never been a system of writing as successful as the alphabet. The magic number, in English, is 26, which is not a small amount of letters to learn when you’re a child, but it’s not insurmountable, either (especially when it’s made into a song), and the combinations of letters that result in meaningful units are infinite. With the alphabet, we can say it long or we can say it short, as when a geneticist invents the term deoxyribonucleic acid and then shrinks it back down to a mere three letters that deliver the same effect: DNA.

The alphabet has chemistry. It might be compared to the periodic table of elements, the way small things stand for large ones and can be used to represent every known material in creation and to synthesize new ones as well. We know where the periodic table came from—Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, published it in 1869—but where did the alphabet come from?

The English alphabet is descended from the Greek alphabet, which was derived (as far as anyone can know these things) from the Phoenician alphabet, which had been in use since at least the eleventh century BC. The Phoenicians were famous traders and needed a system to keep track of the merchandise they ferried throughout the Mediterranean. According to Herodotus, the alphabet was imported to Greece by Cadmus, a prince of Phoenicia. Cadmus was the legendary founder of Thebes, a city that was built by warriors who sprang up after Cadmus, on orders from Athena, sowed the earth with the teeth of a dragon. The earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions date the alphabet to the eighth century BC. Aeschylus had a different story. He attributes the alphabet to Prometheus: writing, like fire, was a gift from the god. Letters were sacred: inscribed on a shard of pottery, even without being arranged into a name or a coherent thought, they could be offered as a gift at the temple of Zeus.

The alphabet is not just the stuff of mythology; mythology may have been the reason for the alphabet. The Western world’s biggest, earliest deposit of mythology is in Homer. The Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, began as an oral tradition and continued as such even after they were written down, sometime around the eighth century BC, about the same time the Greek alphabet was developed. One scholar, Barry B. Powell, suggests the controversial idea that the alphabet may have been invented specifically to set down Homer. Powell asserts that “the Iliad was the first work of literature ever recorded in alphabetic writing.” It was a new technology, invented by someone who was inspired. Homer is “the earliest alphabetic document in the world,” Powell says. Whatever one thinks of Powell’s claim, classicists consider the Iliad and the Odyssey the Bible of the ancient Greek world. From Homer the Greeks got their notions of the gods and the stories that taught people how to deal with the moral dilemmas of war and peace, love and death. The creation of the Greek alphabet was a great awakening.

The Phoenician alphabet that was adapted by the Greeks consisted of twenty-two letters, which were all consonants. Imagine drawing seven consonants in a game of Scrabble. You would have to channel your inner Phoenician or throw the tiles back and forfeit your turn. The innovation of the Greeks—what made the Greek alphabet such a flexible instrument of expression—was the addition of vowels. A lineup of only vowels in Scrabble would not be ideal, but it would have more potential than all consonants. Vowels are the life and breath of a true alphabet—one in which every sound in the language can be represented by a letter or a combination of letters.

The Greeks initially added just four vowels, including the one at the beginning: alpha (A). Alpha came from aleph, the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet. The sound of aleph was barely a sound at all—more like a grunt, the brief redirection of breath known to linguists as a glottal stop. It creates the hitch in uh-oh. The American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary prefaces the entry for the letter A with an illustration of the letter’s evolution from the Phoenician—its lineage. Alpha evolved from a pictorial symbol for ox into a representation of a discrete sound. It originally looked like our letter K: the prongs coming off the straight line resembled ox horns. When we say that the Greeks “adapted” the Phoenician alphabet, we mean they messed with it beyond recognition. They flipped the aleph from right to left (a mirror-image K), moved the vertical line to the center, and rotated it, horns and all, ninety degrees to the left: voilà—a crude A. And all this without benefit of a smartphone camera.

Pliny the Elder noted that Palamedes, a hero of the Trojan War, was sometimes credited with inventing letters to supplement the Phoenician alphabet so as to make it suitable for Greek. In addition to aleph, other Phoenician “gutturals” gave the Greeks names for some of their vowels. The Greek vowel called eta looks like our letter H and represents a long “e” sound (ee), as opposed to the short “e” sound of epsilon. Ayin, which was round like an eye, became omicron—literally, small O.

Later, the Greeks added upsilon, which probably had the sound of “u” (oo) but has slid into an “e” (ee) sound. The very last letter, omega (Ω), literally big O, is one of a handful said to have been invented by Simonides of Ceos, a lyric poet. By the sixth century BC, omega was established, and in 403/2 BC, at the urging of one Eucleides, Athenians voted to replace the old Attic alphabet with the Ionic alphabet, making the omega official.

New consonants were added toward the end of the alphabet, because from the beginning the Greek alphabet doubled as a numerical scheme: alpha = 1, beta = 2, gamma = 3, etc. Mess with that at your peril. Traditionally, the books of the Iliad and the Odyssey were ordered by letter rather than number. Each epic has the same number of books as there are letters in the Greek alphabet: 24. Thus the alphabet gave structure to the text, and that underlying structure feels like an homage to the alphabet.

The letters of the alphabet don’t just float around at random but line up in a well-established order. The order makes the letters easier to learn. What is important, according to The Straight Dope, a newspaper column signed by the fictional Cecil Adams, “isn’t what order the alphabet is in, but that it’s in order at all.” Imagine if everyone in your first-grade class decided to learn the letters in a different order. It would be chaos.

Alphabetical order is remarkably stable: the first two letters have stuck all the way from the Phoenician aleph bet, lending their names to the Greek αλφάβητο and the Roman alphabetum and the English alphabet. The only other word I can think of that stands for a set or an order of things and is known by its members is solfège, the system of musical syllables, containing sol and fa, which is also a system for reading, in this case tones instead of words. There are a few theories about what lies behind alphabetical order, some involving shape, some involving sound.

From the very first letters, the Greek alphabet signals the importance of the vowel-consonant relationship: alpha beta. The vowels in both Greek and English are spaced out over the length of the alphabet, like big beads alternating with strings of small beads:

Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X (Y) Z

It is the combination of vowels and consonants that makes the alphabet so elastic.

The consonants that were added represented sounds Greeks had that Phoenicians didn’t, and they were placed to follow upsilon (Y). The Greek alphabet took over from the Phoenician alphabet as a tool of trade, traveling west in the Mediterranean. Every language that adopted the alphabet adapted it for its own needs. The Etruscans latched on to the Greek alphabet early. Among their contributions was the letter F, repurposing a Greek letter that was pronounced like our W. When the Romans adapted the Etruscan alphabet, they jettisoned several letters because they had no need for them. But during the first century BC the Romans started to use Greek words, so they put back the letters Y and Z, adding the “new” letters to the end.

Anglo-Saxons began to use Roman letters to write Old English when they converted to Christianity in about the seventh century AD. Before that, they used runes. Russians traditionally got their written language when Cyril and Methodius, brothers who were Byzantine monks and missionaries, adapted the Greek alphabet (“perfected” it, the Russians say), adding letters to represent Slavic sounds. Hence it is called the Cyrillic alphabet.

In this way, the original Phoenician aleph bet was shaped, sometimes by a single person, into a system of writing that transcended its commercial usefulness and made it into a tool for the preservation of memory, for recording history and making art: a gift of the Muses and for the Muses.

ONE WAY OF MASTERING the letters in the Greek alphabet is to think of them as characters. A “character” is a symbol for recording language. On Twitter, you originally had to limit your remarks to 140 characters, including all punctuation and spaces between words. (The limit was later doubled to 280 characters, a decision of dubious merit.) The word comes from the ancient Greek charásso, meaning to “make sharp, cut into furrows, engrave.” The leap from a symbol graved in stone to a person endowed with a sharply defined personality is a good example of the way a word ripples out into metaphor.

Can a character, as in a letter of the alphabet, have a character, in the abstract sense of a distinct trait? Certain associations have grown up around the letters that are used as grades in school: A is excellent, B is not as good as A (the B list, a B movie), C is average, D is disappointing, and F is failure, a mark of shame. Then again A is for adultery; it is the scarlet letter with which Nathaniel Hawthorne branded Hester Prynne. Superman has a big red S. Vladimir Nabokov devotes a few paragraphs in his autobiography, Speak, Memory (its title an invocation to the mother of the Muses), to the colors he associates with letters of the alphabet: his “blue group” includes “steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry h.” He goes on, “Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. . . . The word for rainbow . . . is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv.” I think we can agree that Nabokov was hallucinating and stick to an English mnemonic for the colors of the rainbow, Roy G. Biv, an acronym for red orange yellow green blue indigo violet.

Greek letters have their own mystique. Outside of an encounter with pi (π) in geometry class, I did not see Greek characters until I got to college and was puzzled by the symbols attached to the facades of fraternity houses: a gigantic X (chi), a pitchfork Ψ (psi), an impenetrable Φ (phi). No one who is not a member of the fraternity is privy to the secret motto that the characters stand for. Still, if these are the only Greek letters that people are likely to encounter, it is worth looking at “Greek life” as a way into Greek letters.

The first Greek fraternity in America was founded at William and Mary College in 1776, by a student named John Heath. He had supposedly been rejected from a study group with a Latin name, and his response was to found his own study group and give it a Greek name—that would show them. Greek has more snob appeal than Latin. So he formed Phi Beta Kappa. Its members were students of upstanding character who studied hard and got good grades. Phi Beta Kappa (ΦΒΚ) stood for Philosophia Biou Kybernetes: “The love of wisdom is the guide of life.” “Philo” + “sophia” is “love of wisdom”; in “Kybernetes” you can almost make out the word “govern” (through Latin guberno, to steer); and “Biou” is the genitive form of “bio,” life, as in biol ogy (the study of life) and biography (the writing of a life). The copulative verb—“is”—is understood.

Frat boys and sorority girls take their vow of secrecy very seriously. I could persuade only one Greek society, of honors English majors, called Sigma Tau Delta (ΣΤΔ), to reveal its motto to me—Sincerity, Truth, Design. Perhaps this transparency helps to distance its members from the ready association with its English initials: STD.

The fictional Delta Tau Chi (ΔΤΧ) is as nearly the opposite of Phi Beta Kappa as a fraternity can be, its members known as animals for their wild behavior, which supplied the name for both their campus digs and the movie: Animal House. If we knew what secret motto lurked behind those letters (Drink to Excess?), we would have a link between the Greek characters and the characters portrayed in the film.

I have a couple of books about the alphabet—one about the Greek alphabet and two about the English alphabet—but even to an alphabetophile like me these books get boring somewhere around “D is for Delta.” They are just too predictable—we know how the alphabet ends—and one begins to gasp for air between K and L, which is not quite halfway. So let’s skip on down to the end, where the Greeks added the three consonants they needed for sounds the Phoenicians did not have. One is phi, which sounds like f but is usually transliterated in ancient Greek as ph. Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, was Philippos in Greek: lover (philos) of horses (hippos). A hippopotamus is a horse of the river.

Another such character is psi, which may be my favorite letter. It can be found at the beginning of every English word that is a variant on psyche: psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, psychoanalyst, psychosomatic, psychopath, psychopharmacopeia, all descended from Psyche, the lover of Eros, who was the son of Aphrodite. The psi looks like a trident, attribute of Poseidon, god of the sea, and it is the first letter in the modern Greek word for fish: ψάρι (psári).

The third is chi, the one that looks like an X but is most often transliterated as the hard ch in chaos. It is the trickster of the Greek alphabet. It is not the same as our English X—no way. For that, the Greeks have a completely different letter, xi (Ξ). Speakers of English often have trouble pronouncing words with ch in them—melancholy, chalcedony, chiropodist, chimera—because ch also represents the sound in such common English words as church, chicken, and cheese. (You could say our alphabet is imperfect.) To be fair, Greeks cannot pronounce our ch, which is why, in the classic Greek-diner skits on the old Saturday Night Live, John Belushi always called out, “Tseezbourger, tseezbourger, tseezbourger.”

Some translators prefer to skip over the Roman tradition and write chi as kh, for more of a Greek flavor. We are used to seeing the Roman spelling of Achilles, but the name appears in some translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey as Akhilleus. In modern Greek, the consonant sound of chi is a cross between k and h, like the ch of the Hebrew words Chanukah and Chasidic. Some people lack the chutzpah to pronounce that sound and are unable to ask you to pass the challah. Sometimes, chi is transliterated with an h instead of a ch, again as in Hebrew: Hanukkah, Hasidic. So this chi that looks like X takes three forms in English: ch, kh, and h. When the transliterating goes in the opposite direction, for instance, when a Greek wants to spell out the name Hilton, as in the Athens Hilton, he might go with Chilton. An American might laugh at that—it’s against company policy—and the sound of laughter in Greek is spelled with chi: χα-χα.

The character that looks like X has a nonalphabetical use that is common to both languages. According to Scribes and Scholars, a study by L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson of how Greek and Roman literature was preserved and transmitted through the ages, one of the ways that scholars at the Library of Alexandria notated a point of textual interest was by writing the letter chi in the margin. A penciled-in X is still the mark that a conservative reader—that is, one who prefers not to deface a book—puts in the margin next to a line he wants to revisit.

Many of the surviving works of the Greeks—including Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, and Aristotle—have come down to us in the form we have them thanks to the work of the diligent librarians of Alexandria, who, beginning around 280 BC, under Ptolemy Philadelphus, established the canon. If it were not for the ancient librarians, we would not have this trove of books. According to the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, Aristophanes of Byzantium, the head librarian around 200 BC, purportedly invented or regularized the diacritical marks that are such a headache for students of the classics. The librarians cataloged and classified and established authenticity and published authoritative editions. Imagine, the Oresteia of Aeschylus squeaked through in a single degraded manuscript! The first play in this masterly trilogy, Agamemnon, had to be pieced together from fragments. Librarians encouraged a tradition of respect for literature, working to conserve the texts in their original form. Known as scholiasts, they were among the first editors and scholars and literary critics; their annotations, still studied today, are often longer than the works themselves.

When I worked as a sort of scribe (which is a very hard job, by the way, nowhere near as easy as it looks, fraught with perils) in the collating department of The New Yorker, William Shawn would sometimes put an X with a circle around it in the margin of a galley proof to indicate a query that he wanted us to carry over to the next version of the piece. The query might be important, but he did not yet have enough information to address it. We scribes would circle that query in blue and set the page aside to copy onto the next day’s proof, to remind Mr. Shawn to ask the author about it. If the collator put the query directly into the piece, or if the editor tried to make a fix without being sure what the author meant, there was a danger of corrupting the text.

It is conceivable that X is the original, maybe even the aboriginal, written mark. X marks the spot, as it says on all the treasure maps. Its crossed bars create a fixed point. X is also the traditional signature of an illiterate—laboriously scratched out by a cowboy before, with his last spasm, he kicks the bucket—so it is both precise and general: anyone can sign his name with an X. It may be the most useful symbol of all. How did the Phoenicians get along without it? X equals the unknown.

IF YOU THINK GREEK is hard to read now, you should have seen it when the Greeks were just starting out. They had only the capital letters—small letters were developed in the Middle Ages, to speed up writing and save on parchment. I am reluctant to refer to the small letters as “lowercase,” because that term—as well as uppercase, for capital letters—comes from movable type and is anachronistic. Printers organized type into drawers, or cases, and kept the capitals in a higher case and reached down into a case below the upper case for the small letters; ergo lowercase. The uppercase and lowercase letters are also called by the Latinate terms majuscule and minuscule (major and minor).

Greeks did not put any spaces between the words, SOTHEREADERHADTOFIGUREOUTWHEREONEWORDLEFTOFFANDTHEOTHERBEGAN. At first, they wrote from right to left, like the Phoenicians (Hebrew is still written from right to left), but then they switched and wrote from left to right. This probably accounts for the backward orientation of some of the letters, like that aleph that went from a K to a backwards K before settling into alpha: A. For a while, they wrote in both directions: they might start out writing from left to right, and when they ran out of room they would work their way back from right to left, and then turn from left to right again. This manuscript style is called boustrophedon: bous (ox) + strophe (turn)—“as the ox turns,” referring to the way an ox and plow go back and forth across a field. The metaphor suggests some deep connection between writing and the earth.

Spacing is still controversial. Though in modern typography it is generally agreed that one space after a period is enough, there are people who would sooner have their thumbs cut off than give up their right to double-space. Copy editors can guess the age of a writer by his or her typing habits. Those who double-space after a period went to college in the late sixties, early seventies, or earlier, and used a portable typewriter that was a gift from their parents. The New Yorker, in the days of hot type, put two spaces after a period, but when word processers came in, around 1994 AD, the first thing the editorial staff learned was “one space after a period.” Wide spacing has its charms, not the least of which is that it creates jobs for people who remove the extra space.

A few other trends actually seem to be moving backward in the new millennium. For instance, audiobooks are a return to the oral tradition, and podcasts—talks, interviews, radio series— dispense with the written record completely. The codex—the book with turnable pages sewn between covers—was a great improvement over the scroll, but now, with publication online, we are back to scrolling again, which makes it hard to refer back to things. And vowels, the innovation of some god or genius, are now playfully omitted, as if they took up too much space. Someone might write “srsly” online (but not in print), creating a (sltly) humorous effect, or sign off with a distinctive “yrs” instead of the more formal “Yours.” (But no one would dare write “sncrly yrs”—the sentiment is insincere without vowels.) There is a chain of restaurants called GRK, like an abbreviation for an airport, and no one would mistake it for Gork or Grak. People know that here they can get a Greek salad (or GRK sld). A banner outside a church building in New York that was converted into a nightclub called the Limelight, and later into a mall and then a gym, floats the letters MNSTR, leaving one to choose between “monster” and “minister,” and giving no clue what goes on in the building anymore. Who among Phoenicians knew that their alphabet would one day triumph as a marketing gimmick?

Spacing is basically a negative form of punctuation, and it was a great leap forward. Actual marks in the text to help the reader were minimal—a raised dot or two were used to indicate a change of speaker in a play, and there are still arguments over whether a line in, say, the Prometheus belongs to Io or the chorus. Aristophanes of Byzantium gets the credit for using a system of dots to suggest pauses in speech. As Keith Houston recounts in Shady Characters, his book about the history of punctuation, the dot was placed in the middle of the line for a short pause (a comma), at the bottom of the line for a longer pause (a colon), and at the top for a full stop (the period). The modern Greek word for a period is teleía, related to the verb “to finish, complete, perfect.” The comma comes from the Greek word komma, meaning something cut off, a segment. Its form did not solidify until the Renaissance, when printers made sumptuous new editions of Greek works. The comma was created to prevent confusion. Punctuation has always had the reader’s welfare at heart. Ancient Greek has clues right in the words—inflections, tweaks to the spelling—that sometimes make punctuation unnecessary. But would it have killed them to put a period at the end of a sentence?

SOMETIMES, When I was studying Greek on New Yorker time, I’d mix up my alphabets and my dictionaries and open Webster’s when I meant to consult Liddell and Scott—the Greek-English lexicon. I’d flip to the end and be surprised to see the letter Z instead of omega. What is that doing here? I’d wonder, before remembering that I was not in Athens, ancient or modern, but in midtown Manhattan, working in American English.

I don’t mean to demean the letter Z. What would we do without it? The bees would not buzz, the zoo would close for ever, the zigzag would lose its zing. The English alphabet seems to run out at the end in a way that the Greek alphabet does not. The letter Z has the feel of an afterthought, which is exactly what it was when the Romans, who had plucked it out of the Greek alphabet in the first place, restored it by pinning it back on at the end, like a tail on the alphabetum.

In the Greek alphabet, zeta comes sixth, between epsilon and eta. Its name follows the pattern of beta, and it kicks off the pleasing sequence “zeta eta theta.” Both alphabets get a little shaky toward the end. I always have to sing the whole alphabet song to remember the sequence of the letters between QRS and XYZ. The Greek alphabet opens up after Greek Y—upsilon—and tucks in those three consonants that the Phoenician aleph bet lacked and the Greeks could not do without—phi, chi, psi (the order does not come naturally to me)—before crowning the alphabet with omega. Remember that the alphabet song, set to the same tune as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” does not actually end at the letter Z, but goes on to fill out the cadence with the rather lame “Now I know my ABC’s. Next time, won’t you sing with me.” If you were in my second-grade class, you went on to sing the alphabet backwards, proving total mastery, and maybe absorbing the fact that alphabetical order does not necessarily imply a hierarchy.

Z is still called zed in British English, probably a holdover from the Greek zeta. It is thanks to Noah Webster that Americans call it zee instead of zed. Webster knew a thing or two about alphabets—he studied dozens of languages before compiling the great American dictionary. He also knew about pedagogy—how to teach children—having started out as a schoolteacher; his first dictionary was conceived as a spelling aid for grammar schools. Webster would not have attempted to change the order of the alphabet—that would be madness—but he did suggest some improvements.

Rhyme makes things easier to memorize (zeta eta theta), and Webster thought it might better serve the cause of literacy to change the names of certain letters in the English alphabet. H (aitch) would more logically be called “he,” following the pattern of B, C, D, E, and representing its consonant sound. H has a convoluted history as a consonant. In Greek it’s a vowel, eta. The letter got broken down and its upper extremities were used to create breathing marks—rough (’) and smooth (‘)—that look like single quotation marks perched over initial vowels. And W (double U) is completely wrong: I remember looking at it in kindergarten and thinking, But that’s a double V. Webster wanted to simplify W by calling it “we.” (In ancient times, the Greek alphabet had the digamma for the sound of W, but it disappeared sometime after the fall of Troy and hasn’t been heard from since, except in remote scholarly regions—and among the Etruscans.) For similar reasons, Webster thought that Y (why) might better be called “yi.” What a nut. None of these innovations caught on, but by the time Webster got to the end of the alphabet he seems to have worn down the opposition. He succeeded in getting Americans to refer to the ultimate character as zee instead of zed.

Things that come first and last are in especially emphatic positions. In English, we use the expression A to Z to mean everything you need to know—about fashion, fundraising, sex—in a prescribed and predictable order. A theater critic might write that an actress “ran the gamut of emotions from A to Z,” meaning that by the end she was all out, empty, exhausted. Our alphabet runs out of steam. But the Greek alphabet is different. It ends not with a seldom-used consonant but with a big fat vowel: omega, big O, Ω, ω. Oh! Omega has energy in it, it has breath and inspiration. Omega sends you back to the vowel at the beginning, to the alpha, in a way that Z just doesn’t, and picks up overtones from the vowel in the middle, the omicron, or small O. The very shape of the omega is open at the end. The Greek alphabet, like Greek syntax, does not seem linear: it feels round. Nobody seriously translates “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the words of the Almighty from the Book of Revelation, as “I am A through Z.” The Greek alphabet is infinite.