Alphabetical

Also by Michael Rosen

Selected Poems

Fighters for Life: Selected Poems

William Shakespeare, In His Time For Our Time

Michael Rosen's Sad Book, illustrated by Quentin Blake

The Penguin Book of Childhood

Copyright © 2015 Michael Rosen

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

ISBN 978-1-61902-516-5

Cover design by Jen Heuer

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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1

For the three Es, Emma, Elsie and Emile

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Story of A

A is for Alphabet

The Story of B

B is for Battledore

The Story of C

C is for Ciphers

The Story of D

D is for Disappeared Letters

The Story of E

E is for e. e. cummings

The Story of F

F is for Fonts

The Story of G

G is for Greek

The Story of H

H is for H-Aspiration

The Story of I

I is for Improvisation

The Story of J

J is for Jokes

The Story of K

K is for Korean

The Story of L

L is for LSD

The Story of M

M is for Music and Memory

The Story of N

N is for Nonsense

The (True) Story of O

O is for OK

The Story of P

P is for Pitman

The Story of Q

Q is for Qwerty

The Story of R

R is for Rhyme

The Story of S

S is for Signs and Sign Systems

The Story of T

T is for Txtspk

The Story of U

U is for Umlauts

The Story of V

V is for Vikings

The Story of W

W is for Webster

The Story of X

X Marks the Spot

The Story of Y

Y is for Yellow

The Story of Z

Z is for Zipcodes

The Oulipo Olympics

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Index

INTRODUCTION

I
N FRONT OF
me is a line of children and parents who want me to sign their books. As each child comes up to the table I ask their name. For most of the names, I check how it's spelled. Sometimes this is because it's one I haven't heard of, sometimes it's because there are several ways to spell the name, sometimes it's because it's quite possible that the parents have invented a new spelling. So I ask. The child or the parent spells it out for me: ‘S-h-e-r-r-i-l-e-e-n.' ‘Thank you,' I say. ‘Did you come up with that spelling?'

‘Yes,' says the mother.

‘Great,' I say, enjoying the fact that people feel free to take the alphabet into their own hands and use it for their own purposes, making up names, making up spellings, getting the letters that are given to us to do a job that they want done.

The next child arrives. I write his name: ‘Tariq', and have a quiet smile to myself how the rule that the letter ‘q' must, must,
must
be accompanied by a ‘u' and if it's at the end of a word with a ‘u' and an ‘e' is quietly but insistently laid to one side by people with Muslim names. Although we talk of ‘rules' in language, they are in fact more like treaties between consenting groups. We abide by these until such time as someone or some group thinks that they would like to change things and so a new clause is written into the treaty: people with Muslim names don't have to do that ‘u' or ‘u' plus ‘e' thing.

I write my name in their book: ‘Michael Rosen', and I look
at it, trying to be the child or the parent looking at that name for the first time. Will they notice that the ‘m' is always asymmetrical; the dot on the ‘i' is more like an acute accent, pointing up to the top right-hand corner of the page; the ‘r' is flashily curly; the ‘s' is decidedly uncurly?

Like many people I'm curious about my name, but on occasions when the air in schools is full of talk about ‘phonics', I look at ‘Michael' and wonder about the history that enabled the ‘i' to be ‘long' and not short like the ‘i' in ‘pin'. I wonder why the ‘ch' is there when a ‘k' would have done the job very well, and indeed some of the children standing in front of me come from places where it is ‘Mikel'. And then, what about that ‘ae', which I and most English speakers pronounce with the all-pervasive sound which has its own special name – the ‘schwa': why is it ‘ae'? Were the two letters once stuck together as we used to see in ‘encyclopædia' and ‘mediæval'? Or was it once an ‘ae' which was separated by one of the few dots and slashes that English used to be fairly free with? The double dot that used to sit over the ‘i' in ‘naïve' – looking like the German ‘umlaut' but, because it does a different job, separating out vowels – gets its own special name, the ‘dieresis'. And look, here comes a girl to whom, when she tells me her name, I say, ‘Is that Zoe with dots, or no dots?'

Then, on to the ‘Rosen', which often gives people a moment's bother. Is the ‘s' like ‘s' in ‘chosen' or the ‘s' in ‘closer'? I tell people it's ‘Rose' with an ‘n' on the end, a German name. A little flash of German lessons in the late 1950s appears in my thoughts, followed by the memory that the users of English nearly got rid of those ‘n' plurals but not quite: ‘child' – ‘children', ‘man' – ‘men', ‘woman' – ‘women'. How interesting that one last refuge for the ‘n' plural is to do with our sexes – and the result of those sexual differences. As you follow the
development of English, starting out with those cross-Channel migrants, the Frisians from what is now northern Holland, you can see how another wave, the Norman French, put the ‘n' to flight. In most circumstances, people change the language they use by choice, not from being compelled to. Over hundreds of years, people swapped Germanic Ns for Romance Ss. I remember being read a Walter de la Mare poem when I was at school that had the word ‘shoon' in it. ‘It means “shoes”,' explained our teacher. ‘Rosen, it means “roses”,' I think.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, Jews sought equal rights in the German principalities. Part of the deal was that they would take on German names in their daily affairs. This had its price – quite literally; Jews had to buy these new names when some couldn't afford to, and they were sometimes given derogatory, mocking or even obscene names: ‘Ochsenschwanz' – ‘oxtail' – with the tail being lewdly ambiguous; ‘Hinkediger' – ‘hunchback'; ‘Kaufpisch' – ‘sell-piss'. In my family name, though, there is a memory that some forebear had enough money to buy an old German name which was used to record that someone worked in the rose-water trade. What's more, it has been suggested that the Rosen-type names were popular amongst those Jews whose Hebrew name recorded a matronymic, a name that says: ‘I am the son of this woman'. So, a man might be Ezra ben Rosa – son of Rosa, and to remember that, some people opted for one of the Rosen-type names. The sound of ‘Rosa', transferred across from Hebrew letters, conserved in the Roman letters ‘r', ‘o', ‘s' and ‘e', was perhaps a piece of cultural self-awareness, resistance even. I take it that people anywhere, any time, can make letters do this kind of work for them. If the situation demands it, they can switch languages, create hybrids, invent new spellings – new identities even. Naming ourselves and others is part of how we
show that we are at one and the same time ‘me' and part of an ‘us'. Slight changes in spellings, initials or even the particular script might signify a great deal.

Letters, then, are ours; we inherit them in what look like fixed ways but there is some leeway for us to change their use. It's this process of being within the history of language but also in possession of the possibility of its change that has always fascinated me. It's why I've written this book.

Before I get going, I should clear the decks. The book is apparently about ‘the' alphabet, but in truth it's about ‘an' alphabet, the one that speakers of English use. It's sometimes called the ‘Roman alphabet' which is misleading because, no matter how beautifully we may think they carved their inscriptions in stone, the Romans didn't have all twenty-six letters or the lower case. If we say it's the alphabet used by European languages, that too is slightly misleading because languages other than English that use the same letters have added special features of their own, like the German double ‘s' symbol, ‘ß', or the many varied ‘diacritics' or ‘accents'. To my mind, the accents, the umlaut, the tilde, the circumflex, the cedilla and the rest are part of people's alphabets. The alphabet of this book, which I'll be calling ‘the alphabet', hasn't developed these useful signs. To be absolutely clear: just because I'm calling it ‘the alphabet', I'm not intending to lend it any particular glitter or glory; I'm not positioning it in any way higher in status than any other alphabet or system of writing. It's ‘the' alphabet, as in ‘the alphabet I use when I write in English'.