• THE HISTORY OF ‘F’ may seem rather tenuous. It starts out looking like our ‘Y’, with the name ‘waw’, indicating a ‘w’ sound. That’s how the Phoenicians had it. The first ancient Greeks had it first as ‘wau’ then as ‘digamma’ and tipped the ‘Y’ over to look like a backward-looking version of our ‘F’, still indicating the ‘w’ sound. The Etruscans kept more or less to the same shape and sound but it was flipped to face the other way when the writing ran from left to right (by about 650 BCE). The Romans regularized this way of writing it, making the cross-lines at a firm geometric right angles to the vertical.

The Romans were also responsible for turning the ‘w’ sound to an ‘f’ sound. People who write about this change tend to describe this process as an act of great rationality along the lines of saying that the Romans suddenly became aware that (a) they didn’t need a ‘w’ and could give that job to ‘u’, and (b) they needed a letter to indicate the ‘f’ sound, so (c) they did. Given that the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall in a straight line across hills, this is indeed a possible scenario.

f

As with the letters preceding ‘f’, the early medieval scribes were responsible for bending the right angles and the early modern printers took that shape for their lower-case ‘f’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

As we know, the name for ‘F’ doesn’t rhyme with the letter-names for ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘G’, ‘P’, ‘T’, ‘V’ and the US-pronounced ‘Z’. Instead it chimes with ‘L’, ‘M’, ‘N’, ‘S’ and ‘X’, along with ‘R’ if you’re calling these letter-names vowel sounds plus the letter’s value. Lovers of regularity would have us say ‘fee’, ‘lee’, ‘mee’, ‘nee’, ‘ree’ and ‘see’, and, for ‘X’, they’d want something like ‘ksee’. Interestingly, there is something that unites ‘F’, ‘L’, ‘M’, ‘N’ and ‘S’. They are consonants that can all be pronounced continuously, though they aren’t alone in this (see ‘V’). At one point in Roman times they appear to have had double-syllable names like ‘effay’ and ‘emmay’ and perhaps they kept their first syllables to make it easy to distinguish when spelling out words: we say, ‘Emmm, not ennnn,’ to make things clear. That’s one theory, anyway.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

‘F’ is one of the more consistent letters, telling us to put our teeth over the top of our lower lip and breathe out. Some Londoners have found this so pleasing that the sound that most other speakers of English deliver as the ‘th’ in ‘thorn’, they pronounce as ‘f’. ‘Free’ and ‘three’ are pronounced identically. I once wrote a silly poem joke that plays on the names of English football clubs: ‘Manchester United 1 Manchester City lost; Everton nil Arsenal not very well either . . .’ In some schools where I’ve read it, this has immediately set off a bout of punning on football club names and numbers: ‘Aldershot 2 Birmingham shot 1’. In London, one boy said, ‘Hang on, sir, I’ve got an international result here: “Finland 3 Fatland 2”.’ More intriguingly, a girl once handed me a story in which she wanted to represent the speech of her friends. One of them in her story said, ‘Thuck off, Diane!’ She was trying to compensate for the fact that she had been told over and over again to say and write ‘three’ for when she said ‘free’.

We write the voiced form of ‘F’ as ‘V’ except in the word ‘of’. On the other hand, in German the letter ‘V’ is pronounced as we pronounce the letter ‘F’ and the sound we make with ‘V’ is represented by the letter ‘W’. This gives German and British comedians a good deal of stereotypic scope in their imitations of Brits and Germans respectively. English spelling once made no distinction between the ‘F’ and ‘V’ sounds, representing them both as ‘F’. It was only when the Romance ‘V’ became sufficiently popular that it pushed the ‘F’ for voiced ‘F’ out of the way. ‘Love’, once spelled with an ‘f’ but never pronounced ‘luff’, became ‘love’.

‘F’ combines with all the vowels along with ‘r’ and ‘l’ as in ‘fry’ and ‘fly’. ‘Ffiona’ exists as a Welsh spelling form. Placing a consonant sound in front of the ‘f’ gives us the great slang word ‘bumf’ (supposedly short for ‘bum fodder’), the un-transliterable acronym ‘MILF’, the name ‘Wilfred’, the word ‘infant’, and the film company ‘Agfa’.

‘F’ gives us the ‘F-word’ which can’t really be a euphemism because the moment someone says it, we know the word they’re referring to.

Sound-play with ‘f’ gives us ‘fluff’, and the word my father used for ‘don’t fuss’ – ‘don’t faff’. ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum . . .’ has lasted several centuries. There is also a noise of disbelief doing the rounds which sounds something like ‘fwof’. Unhelpfully enough, sometimes the ‘f’ sound can also be written with a ‘ph’: when we say ‘phew’ to tell people we’re tired or relieved. ‘Phwoar’ – as the noise to mean, ‘You’re sexy’.

‘For better or for worse’ is a double phrase in which each half is linked by the initial ‘f’ in ‘for’.

And there’s a far, far better thing . . .