This portion of Everything You Know About English Is Wrong is a love letter to letters. You can sing letters in the ABC song, you can twist them in different typefaces, you can rearrange them endlessly and create these things called words, with nuance of choice (for example, see the entry for “Gray/Grey” on page 191 in this section).
Not everyone loves specific letters. In 1779, Benjamin Franklin published his A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling, which proposed to eliminate C, J, Q, W, X, and Y. Those letters, Franklin noted, kould be replased uith ekzisting karakters. I, being a suspicious sort, am deeply concerned that this proposal was shot down for political reasons; the Scrabble lobby was very strong, even then. Franklin proposed six new characters, including “ish” to handle the sh sound. He also suggested a new alphabetical order, which would have to have been renamed “oh-oh-atical order,”
as he proposed O become the first letter, followed by a new char-
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acter, oa (in ligature and pronounced as the O in “John”).
Ambrose Bierce expressed his chagrin over a couple of letters in his Devil’s Dictionary, including this grousing (or should I say, growsing):
W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like epixoriambikos. Still, it is now thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of “the glory that was Greece and the rise of “the grandeur that was Rome.” There can
60 It should be duly noted that Franklin's proposal, in modem parlance, never made it past alpha version into beta testing.
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be no doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it “wow,” for example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured.
Supporting Bierce’s suggestion is the fact that, interestingly, the symbol that is the parent of W so many centuries back is the Phoenician letter called “wau.”
Now, with Ambrose as our inspiration, let’s engage in a bit of orthography, my favorite big word meaning “spelling”: Using his suggested letter name, we would spell the word wow as Wow O Wow! And how would you spell the spelling? “Wow oh wow oh wow oh wow” . . . which sounds positively orthogasmic.
And besides, I as a language lover find poetic beauty in understanding that every word begins with a wow.
But back to Mr. Franklin’s proposal. He designed his updated alphabet to begin with O and end in M, which is somehow appropriate to this discussion, as we will start by pointing out that the final letter of the current alphabet is not the last, and end by pointing out that the first letter of the current alphabet is not the first.
Z
The last letter of the alphabet is not Z.
Z is not the final letter of the alphabet for several reasons.
The first is technical: Allow me to restate the headline of this note as an American would say it. “The last letter of the alphabet is not Zee.” And our sample American would be right, because zed is the last letter of the alphabet. In the States, the letter is referred to as “zee”; for the rest of the English-speaking world, it’s referred to as zed.
Nothing wrong with this difference. It’s not going to cause any sort of international misunderstanding (“You mean Zimbabwe with a zee? We sent the Prime Minister to Zimbabwe with a zed!”). And no one is going to attempt to get the States in synch with the rest of the world (witness the success in converting the U.S. to the metric system). Just thought you’d like to know.
The second reason Z is not the last letter of the alphabet is historical: Z should not be the last letter of the alphabet. While the alphabet has changed considerably in its evolution from Phoenician through Greek through Etruscan through Latin, the order of the letters largely has not. Call it alep or aleph or alpha or a, the alphabet starts with a. Learn your alep-bayit-gimels; your aleph- beth-gimels; your alpha-beta-gammas ; your ABCs. But when the Romans adapted the Etruscan alphabet, they eliminated Z, which had been the seventh letter of the Phoenician alphabet and the eighth letter of the Greek (“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” not “I am the Alpha and the Zeta”). When the Romans reintroduced Z, its place had been taken. No cuts! To the end of the line with you!
The third reason Z is not the last letter of the alphabet is likewise historical. And here we’re talking about the last to be added, because five—count ’em—five letters were added to our alphabet even after Z’s triumphal return. The Latin alphabet when introduced to the Anglo-Saxons failed to represent three sounds used by the native peoples. Two sounds were very close to our present- day th lithp sound, and the native letters representing them are |d and D, thorn and eth. A third was wynn (the W sound, represented by the still-surviving letter W (which literally began as W). When the letters J and V came along, they, like the later W, got their cuts into the middle of the line, because, in a sense, they had connections. I snuck J in (because I needed a break, having functioned to
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communicate both the I and J sounds), and U snuck V in (it, too, need an assistant after all that time representing both the U and V sounds).
Is it unfair that these letters, particularly V and W, got cuts? Sure, but after all, it’s all about who U know.
YE
File under “O Ye of Little Faith”: There is no such word as Ye in phrases like “Ye Olde.”
You have perhaps seen the sign for that quaint retail establishment, “Ye Olde (aomography Shoppe” (well, maybe not as often as I have). There are lies and there are truths in that sign, and let’s untangle them.
First of all, despite appearances, the primary word is not Pornography. The first letter in that word is actually a now-obsolete Old English letter, “|d>” which indicated the “th” sound. So our retail establishment is actually “The Olde Thornography Shoppe,” appropriate because the name of the letter (d is thorn.
And you’ve likely noticed that I also changed Ye to The when I clarified the shop’s name. Specifically, it should be “( 3 e Olde Thornography Shoppe,” because there is no Y in the first word. When thorn was handwritten, it was often mistaken for Y, and when typesetting came along, Y was often used to indicate the disappearing thorn character when setting ye olde manuscrippes. Thus the word the, written as \)e, was misinterpreted as Ye.
However, the ultimate he in my example is that to my knowledge there is no retail establishment called “Olde Pornography
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Shoppe,” and don’t you dare put this book down to go find out.
u
It’s not always about U.
As I write this, Sue Grafton has mysteried her way through most of the alphabet with her remarkable series of abecedarian whodunits, starting with A Is for Alibi and B Is for Burglar, and so on (I believe that something related to C was next). The series has successfully progressed to its latest volume, T Is for Trespass. What’s next?
I can guarantee you that Grafton’s next book will not be U Is for Victim.
Though it could be. And properly so, at least in a historical sense.
The letter Vis a relative newcomer to the English alphabet. Now, the “vee” sound has been with us for a long time, as has the “you” sound, but these sounds were represented by a single letter— U. Like Y, U could be both consonant and vowel, as could the letter I (also see “Vowels, Part IV (and I mean the alphabet letters, not the Roman Numerals)” on page 192 for more on that.) The Romans used V to represent sounds that we communicate with U, V, and W. In fact, W, another johnny-come-letterly, is literally double-!/, with the U looking like V—squinch ’em together: VV. (If the idea of V having multiple functions like that seems odd to you, consider a couple of things we accept every day, though when we look at them closely, they seem a little bizarre: hard-C, soft-C; hard-G, soft-G.)
This multiple use contributed to why we have what seems to be complete dyslexia in this quote from Robert Cawdrey’s pioneering dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall (1604): “Do we not speak, because we would haue other to vnderstand vs? or is not the tongue giuen
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for this end, that one might know what another meaneth?” Hauing others to vndersand vs is a noble goal indeed, which is why I’m also amused by the unintentional irony of this quote from Henry Cockeram's The English dictionarie, or an interpreter of hard English words (1623): “Vacillate, to wauer, to be inconstant.” Nothing like a wauering letter to keep vs all confused.