Z

And in the end, the letter Z: last and least in the English language. The buzzing business of Z is common in speaking. It represents a unique sound, made more often by S (and occasionally X, as previously discussed), in many pluralizing usages (such as "usages"). Note that Z does get pride of place in the word "pluralize," or actually more like the suffix "-ize," which takes passive nouns and punches you in the face with them: visualize, fossilize, modernize. Heady stuff, Z! Yet there it languishes at the back of all the letters in all ways. In cartoons, it is tripled up (or more) to indicate sleeping, some might say snoring—some might say boredom. In recent times people have begun to talk about needing their Zs, meaning sleep or naps. It's only appropriate, as the last thing. At the end of the day, sleep is what happens. Like most of the lesser-used letters—J, Q, and such—Z has a bit of a forlorn buffoonish aspect. One is tempted to make fun of its mouth noise as something to be classified with whistles, cork-popping, and whoopee cushions. Maybe that's some association with the word "kazoo." But Z also has its cozy, lazy elements—I'm only speaking "zee" truth, as the French say. Speaking of the French, in the UK they call the letter "zed," which sounds more to me like an out-of-town relative in for a surprise visit. It's so wrong I don't even know what to do with it. I'll just leave it at that. Don't forget, in spite of its lastness and leastness, Z is still often found where the action is. Consider zero, which is probably the single most interesting number if we were going to rank them (other than numerically—and no, I'm not going to write about all the numbers, that would take too long). Z stands for zebra, which most children learn early—again, a highly insignificant fact to know at all, let alone introduce into the developing human brain. At some point in recent years Z has come to stand for zombies too, which only makes sense in this crowded and overheating world. Teach that to your children. The letter Z and its insignificance reduce us to questions like, "Hey, did you ever see Zardoz?" Yes, I did, and it was about as memorable as the letter Z. Perhaps I'm engaging in blaming the victim. Which raises the question: is Z really a victim, if it is both the least used letter and the last letter in the alphabet? Isn't it actually more like a case for once in its miserable life that the English alphabet behaves rationally? Kudos, I say. Kudos. Zebras in zoos for the children, zombies in the countryside for the rest of us, the inimitable zero, and what? We know we are reaching the end now because soon all will be zzz. By the way, I still think we should kick Q out of the alphabet. I say again, 25 is a much better number than 26. Good night, everyone.

Y

Y has a lot to yell about, I'd be lying if I told you any different. Yes, it has a personality crisis, but who doesn't? The fact is it's both a consonant and a vowel, though who thought this was a good idea is unclear. It is a consonant in words such as "yellow," "yuck," and "yes," where it approximates the J sound but without the tongue involved. Because of its association with yes, perhaps, it's taken as a generally upbeat noise to make, as in "yay," "yahoo," and "yippee." Interestingly, in "yay" (an "informal word"), we happen to see both functions of Y, though it is here more on the order of another blasted silent letter, inflecting the "a" to make it long. A better example is "xylophone," where it represents the long I. We don't know why, but I have to admit "why" is a much better-looking word than "whi" or "whei." Aiyiyi. Even doing this freakish double duty, Y still only manages to make #18 on the ranked list of most frequently used letters, just behind G, just ahead of P. Apparently somebody somewhere calculated it and determined that Y is more often a consonant and only "sometimes" a vowel. Or perhaps that is because its uniqueness is found in its consonant function, whereas the vowel only tends to mimic variations on E, I, and whatever it is doing in words like "joy" and "decoy." Y stands for some of the things we most treasure: yes, youth, and yesterday—even better, make that yesteryear. Also "you"—even though U certainly also has fair claim to the, er, "objectified other." The consonant Y opens naturally into loud vocal eruption from the diaphragm, heading up words such as "yell," "yelp," "yowl," "yodel," and "yargh"—not all sounds of pain, I assure you. Chronic alphabetizers know already that Y is the last sad little bump in the alphabet. Not many things begin with X or Z and Y usually matches or outdoes them in an index. Still, T and W would probably have to be counted as the last alphabetical urban outposts of any size. But Y always stubbornly makes a dent. This reminds me. Have you seen the movie Yi Yi? It's really good. The word "yawn" is associated with Y's consonant function. Maybe you're yawning now, because that's how yawns work, the more you see or hear the word (or the yawning itself) the more you want to yawn. Y obviously pairs with N. Do I have to explain that? Y / N (circle one). Y also has a profound relation (marked by decorative crossbars) to yen, the Japanese currency. I'd like to make a joke about Yugoslavia but nothing about Yugoslavia is funny. In German, by the way, J is assigned Y's consonant function, and the mouth noise is again associated with the assenting: yes and ja (or, for you Germans, yes und ja). That's Y all over for you! You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, a vowel.

X

X marks the spot. Or should that be "Marx"? The first thing to understand about X, more or less, is that it's just a decoration, most of its letter functions handled quite nicely by K and S together. Or Z, in the case of Xavier who is taking xylophone lessons. But what a decoration, two bold slashes defining at their intersection the infinity of a single point. X is not often used in words, outranking only Q and Z for frequency, but what are words when the very shape of X makes it almost notorious? It is how illiterates sign their names when witnesses are available (literate themselves, one hopes, else the last will and testament begin to resemble the diagram of a football play). It's where the loot is buried on treasure maps. Triple it up and it's the hottest sex you never had. In cartoons it appears as eyeballs to indicate drunkenness or general confusion. Christians were all over the X back in their underground days, seeing it as a symbol of the cross, with "Xmas" a term of respect and convenience, and not Exhibit 999 in Fox News tales of War on Christmas. The red circle and slash has become more the marker of "get the fuck away from this," but X can work in a pinch. In late night infomercials, for example, scenes of muss and fuss are often demolished by a flashing X. It's utilitarian as hell, but speaking of hell, there's also some aura of the forbidden, even evil, about X. Yes, the porn associations, but they came later. I suspect it's what's behind all the objections to "Xmas"—the reduction of our lord and savior to the eyeballs of a drunken reprobate, the representation of an infinite singularity of nothingness. If ABC is all that is good and holy and respectable, XYZ is NOT. That makes the counterpart of the fine and upstanding letter A, which is the George Washington of the alphabet, none other than X, the thief, hiding in the cellar of the alphabet, stealing sounds that aren't even used that much anyway. It's just hanging around down there. For what purpose? What does it want? It is terrifying me. Aiee, I must flee! X somehow induces this panic terror of the unknown. X is always the mysterious factor. X is what death looks like, we somehow suspect. So you have to respect that. It chips in to the negation prefix streams of "un-" and "non-" and "dis-" with one of the most powerful, in "ex-," which of course also comes with all its own tender painful connotations. In retrospect, I'm not sure the rock band X was ever up to the great and terrible burden of the letter, but give them credit for trying. The cover of Under the Big Black Sun has always looked to me like something X itself might have designed—the letter, I mean, not the band. That's the thing about X. It's the only letter that actually might be sentient itself. Think about that the next time you're playing tic-tac-toe.

W

Some things you should know about W: Every other letter in the English alphabet is satisfied with a single syllable as its name—sometimes a single mouth noise, as with E. That is only in the spirit after all of what a letter is. What does W do? Helps itself to not one but two extra syllables. How does it accomplish this? By looking at the letter U (of all things), puffing up its widdle chest, and saying, "I'm twice that." W is embroiled in practically every scandal of the alphabet there is. For subtlety, it participates in an odd round robin of oppositional pairings: L and R, left and right, R and W, right and wrong, W and L, wins and losses. Too subtle for you? All right. Why don't we saw away awhile on the silent letter. There it is, where it belongs, as the first letter in the word "wrong." Talk about meta. Wikipedia says words such as "wreak, wrap, wreck, and wrench" originally had the W pronounced by sly dog Angle-Saxons. It still is apparently in some Scottish dialects, woe to we all. I don't see a word in Wikipedia, by the way, about W as consonant and "sometimes" vowel. But I recall hearing that my younger siblings were taught W that way. In the wilds of the Internet I found a paragraph at dictionary.com concerning the issue. A couple of archaic Welsh words—"cwm," "crwth"—would indeed appear to be using the W exactly as a vowel, but who uses those words? By the time the short article was on "low" and "bow" it was clear someone somewhere at some point wanted to make a distinction about the direction in which the lips are traveling as they glide in and out of pursed position for W. Coming in, it appears, somehow makes it a vowel. The dictionary.com article concludes that L, M, N, and R may also be considered "sometimes" vowels in this regard, offering as examples "bottle," "bottom," "button," and "butter." So there you have it: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes L, M, N, R, W, and Y. What a world, what a world. But then I remembered the knowing way someone actually inserted W into the word "vowel" itself, and I was all right again. It's all wrong, but that's the way we do things around here. As for its utility, well, W is ranked #15 for frequency of use, just behind M, just ahead of F (a motherfucker). I'd like to propose changing the pronunciation of W to "I'm twice that," which you'll note is also three syllables, preserving its dignity. Well, it may scan a little differently, for you poets and singers, and might take some work in places. But some applications already work quite well: George I'm-twice-that Bush, for example. Walla Walla!

V

V is for victory. Hold your two first fingers as if holding a cigar, with the back of the hand facing forward. Turn your hand the other way and that V is for peace, according to some hippies. V is very much of everything—including less popular, as, indeed, are all the letters we are about to encounter in the lowest tray of the alphabet as I learned it, V, W, X, Y, and Z. Among them, anyway, V rates pretty well—third after W and Y for frequency of use. But let's put that in perspective. W is #15 across the entire alphabet, well out of the top 10. Y is #18. And V is #21, just behind B and ahead of K. Lowly, yes, but such fine company right there. So what if V is infrequently used? It's a fun sound to make—the sound of the kazoo, essentially, with lower lip serving as vibrating surface across which the breath and vocal cords do their jimjams. V was well suited to the motor age, notably in its well known "vroom-vroom" application. It is a thoroughly modern letter somehow. A real V8. It had to be V for Vietnam. One nice thing about these lesser-used letters is the way little complexities can rush in to fill the gaps of a paucity of use. In online chat, lowercase, V has a busy life as "very," where it is prone to the inflationary impulse that follows such compression. I think four now are as many as I've seen in standardized use in front of an N (for "nice"): vvvvn. That's very, very, very, very sincere, ty. At that point the meaning begins to drain away from V, like the meaning from a word that you repeat too many times to yourself. You start to see the resemblance that it has to a checkmark, or mountain peaks side by side. You realize it can equally validly be expressed as a precise angle, say 35 degrees. It is, after all, also the mathematical greater-than and less-than symbols swung to balance impossibly on its tip. That's V all over for you—balancing impossibly on its tip. In the hard sciences, V really has a presence, almost celebrity status, with volumes, velocity, vectors, and such. In Roman numeral cloud cuckoo land, V is the number 5. With its connection to things visual, V is important in today's entertainment industry, as in TV, DVD, VHS, VCR, etc. As we noticed before with M and N, V and W are two letters sitting next to one another in the alphabet with a resemblance, as if they were put together that way purposefully. For that matter, U, which immediately precedes V, also has something of a family resemblance. However, V is the only one balancing impossibly on its tip (singular). If I ever see you online, you will have to admit that's a vvvvg trick.

U

I like U, even if it is a bit of an underwhelming underachiever, 21st letter of the alphabet and last true vowel (we will be dealing with "sometimes" presently). It also boasts a peculiar and unique relationship with Q, which for reasons we don't exactly understand (or maybe we do? See Q) won't leave home without it. But compare the rest of the over-muscled vowels, whose rates of usage far outpace U's: E (#1), A (#3), O (#4), I (#5), U (#13). Underachiever! No fewer than eight of the worker-bee consonants outrank it. Yet U figures prominently in what could well be the two most used words in the English language: "uh" and "um." In its short form, represented in pronunciation guides by the schwa, it could be the most frequently used of all human sounds. In terms of its shape and form, for a long time it looked like the letter V, at least if stone chiselers are to be given any credence. We know that from all the "mvsevms" and "vniversities" we still see around. You also see U in relation to radioactivity, as the symbol for both uranium and the atomic mass unit. It's another letter whose fortunes changed with the coming of mass electronic communications—aided and abetted again by the rock star Prince, who was way out in front of that stuff. Truly, I do like the use of U for "you," not least for the symmetry it represents with the egotistical I. There is something pleasingly balanced about U and I. At the same time, unfortunately, it looks illiterate to me. I don't know if I'll ever get used to it that way. U may feel differently—U might get used to it. U also figures prominently in the negating process, whose many prefixes include "un" near the head of the line. I suspect "non" may now serve the more generic role, but I remember periods when indicating the opposite of almost anything was managed by hanging an "un" out front, viz., un-American, uncola, unhappy, untoward, unfunny. Those were better days for U but it's always been just a little bit of a laggard. Its top-open curve shape is a pleasing form but the question of the tail niggles at me. It destroys the simple beauty of the curve shape yet also seems wrong without it. Even the hand-printed version of the capital. Write it out for yourself. I bet you put a tail on it, didn't U? Coming off the right side on a downstroke. It's ungainly not least because now it just looks like a mistake, the lowercase figure but too big for its size, like an adolescent enduring a growth spurt. Like most letters, U is just full of tricks. Q is not the only place where it brings the W—"quick" and "quality," yes, sure, but also consider "anguish" and "suave" (and then compare "unique" and "guard," thank you Wikipedia). Funny fellow U are—or is, I should say, to be clear. Or unclear.

T

Alphabetically, T falls at #20, but in terms of frequency of usage, it is #2, trailing only E. Among other things, that makes T the #1 consonant. But don't get too excited—as with Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, T is unlikely to overtake E any time soon. E represents 12.7% of all letters used whereas T is nearly four points behind, at 9.0%. After that the bunching is tight: A, 8.2% ... O, 7.5% ... I, 7.0% ... N, 6.7% ... S, 6.3%, and so forth. Still, at #2, T has a grip on its destiny. As a thought experiment, I wonder how things would change if the definite article, "the," were changed to "xqz," made up of the three least-used letters. I suppose we'll never know because it has the drawbacks of appearing unpronounceable and also makes no etymological sense. We would never get used to it. Imagine encountering this sentence in a story: "Hey," said xqz handyman, "will you grab me xqz pliers over there, please." No. It would never do. For the most part, T operates as the so-called "voiceless alveolar stop," the noise made with the tip of the tongue against the region of the mouth back of the upper teeth. It doesn't seem to me exactly the most natural sound to make with a mouth, not like M or R or S (let alone H, a sound that adults make at the rate of 16 to 20 times per minute). This might explain why T arrives so late in the alphabet—it is dead last in Hebrew, for example. When H sidles up next to T, it's time to start lisping. Why is T given this assignment? I don't have time to go into that or into Thomas or thyme either. Sometimes when T and I appear together, they act like S and H (not to mention I and T): "purgation," "ratio," "Croatia." Nobody got time for that. For that matter, the whole TH mouth noise adventure is something of a peculiarity, unknown altogether, for example, in German, French, Persian, Japanese, and Mandarin. For those of us with a penchant for the square (not mutually exclusive with one for the curve!), T is one of the finest shapes to be found in the alphabet. So pleasing in fact that the T-square, an instrument or tool that enables drawing or testing right angles, was named for it. It stands on a single point, bearing its horizontal crossbar with equanimity and poise. In its lowercase form it takes on the look of the Christian cross and/or fishhooks, but it's still a pretty good-looking letter, simple, sturdy, evocative, eternally enduring, or suggesting such things. T is yet another one of those little letter narcissists that likes to double up and pal around with itself, doppelganger style. T is hardly the only letter that does so, but it shows an especial effrontery by doing so in the word "letter" itself. Tsk, tsk.

S

S is for serpent, which it looks like and which it sounds like. But don't hold that against it. It has nothing to do with sin other than fronting for the word. It doesn't actually want you to eat an apple. It's far too busy demonstrating the Calvinist work ethic as one of the busiest letters in the alphabet—#7 most frequently used, which somewhat belies its rather lowly position as the 19th of 26 letters. Consider its many duties. Perhaps it's best known as The Pluralizer, converting one noun to many nouns by the simple expedient of showing up, sometimes, for the ladies and the laddies, with helper letter E and doubling consonants as needed. With S, there's always room for more. A friend becomes friends, a cat becomes cats. Put S at the end of many verbs and they are activated, moving forcefully into the eternal present. You already know you can run, eat, learn, but runs, eats, learns is for when you are actually doing it, a pinpoint focus on pure activity. For the most part, S maintains its integrity, but as with so many letters in this English alphabet it is occasionally lured from the straight and narrow. It is essentially a sibilant, a subtle sound made with the tongue at the back of the upper teeth, and a sharp exhalation. It is a remarkably penetrating noise as anyone can tell you who has sat in a darkened theater with people randomly hissing about things they don't like. Pair S with H, however, and the sibilance is still there but now caused by the jaw mostly closing the mouth against the exhalation to please be quiet please, another sound sadly heard too often in theaters nowadays, along with its cause, people randomly having conversations—plural. S is so pleased with itself about this land grab with H that it also molests the letter U at will for the same effect, as in "sugar" and "sure." This does not occur without surcease, which makes it annoying. It's small potatoes, of course, compared to the gyrations of some other letters we could name. Otherwise, S struggles for a personality. Inevitably it is a computer programming language. Someday each letter of the alphabet will have its own programming language and mergers will be allowed only if they spell words found in the Scrabble dictionary. One thing you can say about S is that it certainly has a lovely sinuous shape, printed or cursive, and damn the serpentine association. Just as there is no I in team there is no S in evil (though here its blunt force strength as The Pluralizer unfortunately works against it). Ultimately, that very fungibility of S saves it. It is so perfectly utilitarian. You can add it to the end of maybe 75% of the words in the English language and arrive at something with a perfectly new and useful meaning. S does have the unfortunate propensity of so many consonants to pair off with itself: pass, lassitude, gross, mission ... wait, what was that noise my mouth just made? Oh crafty S with your many ways!

R

It's clear no letter of the alphabet is more approved by pirates, but R has much more going for it as well. It's ranked #8 overall for frequency of use—#4 among consonants, after only T, N, and S. In English it is primarily a growling noise, with the tongue flipped back in the mouth to texture the vocalization (an "alveolar approximant," in the argot of linguistics). But in other languages, such as Spanish, it takes on a rolling, purring, motorized sound called trilling, which I have never been able to make, just as I never learned to stick two fingers in my mouth and make a piercing whistle. I don't see these as flaws, particularly as I don't speak Spanish, but yes, the potential for problems is there. R is tucked pretty far down there, as the 18th letter of the alphabet—it's 18, I just don't know what to say. Now that we are so deep into the alphabet, do individual letters even have distinct personalities anymore? That is our course of inquiry, you see, and the obvious answer is yes, of course they do. But the workhorses that make up the majority of letters in this tray of the alphabet as I learned it, namely Q, R, S, T, and U, are mostly too busy representin' and performing extremely important stitching-together language work, notably R, S, and T (and with the notable exception of Q, as previously discussed). U is a vowel—as with pitchers on baseball teams, the numbers favor the impact of vowels as single units over the everyday players that are the consonants. Vowels have to be considered separately. The bailiwick of R includes a primitive one-upmanship function of making everything better—bigger, faster, more wonderfuller—just by showing up at the ends of adjectives (with E and doubling consonants as needed). If you think that's great I'll tell you it's greater, and I'll be growling too, because that's the way R rolls. R is always going to be one step ahead of you, at least until S and T combine to stop the greater quarrel, and make it the definitive greatest. Working with verbs, R makes nouns with admirable work ethics: doer, thinker, farmer, and (the greatest of them all) writer. In mathematics, R represents the set of all so-called real numbers ("real numbers"—never mind). R also works part-time as a warning to parents (and red flag to adolescents) about certain movies. I have always respected R as a utility player in the alphabet, such are its many faceless powers—how can you not? But as a handwritten letter, printed or cursive, capitalized or lowercase, it is somehow always a nuisance to make and never quite looks the way it should. For the sake of R's dignity, it's a good thing there's typing.

Q

The letter Q stands in as the crown royalty queen class of the alphabet. Is there any other letter so nauseatingly cute, so entirely useless? It is eccentric in a way similar to how the knight chess piece moves, which at least can be turned to the purpose of the game. Practically everything Q does could be done as effectively by K and W in combination, or K all by itself ("out of Irak!"). Furthermore, Q has the temerity to impose a truly ridiculous requirement, which is that it will not appear in public, at least in the English language, without accompaniment of its Batman-Robin sidekick U, no doubt bare-legged too. "Wherever go I," says this silly letter in the haughty tones of the peerage (meaning itself, Q, not the letter I), "there goes U." And why is this? Does anyone know? Does anyone even ask? On the other hand, consider the rakish beauty of the circle intersected by the coy slash. In lowercase the sly variation on both p and g is elegant as silk. Here I am, suddenly charmed by Q! Quick, I need a drinq. Various American marketers over the years have demonstrated that the phonetic replacement for the sake of clarity somehow just isn't kwite convincing, or even that kwik to parse. And of course Q looms somewhat more useful in other languages, where it may be a form of the throat-clearing found in the German "ch" (generally absent as a mouth noise from English). Around here it's quickly apparent that it's quite an affectation, no question. At least we respect that about it, using it so sparingly that it ranks #25 in the alphabet for frequency of use, ahead of only Z. I want to say that even Z belongs ahead of Q for that matter, because of its undeniably unique mouth noise sound, but you can't have everything, and we'll get to that. Q does have some utility representing the word "question" (as in "a Q and A story"), signifying a transcribed interview. It was also the name of one of the worst characters ever to appear in the Star Trek franchise (though I would hazard that Lwaxana Troi still remains single worst by orders of magnitude). Maybe that's why I don't like Q. Because, let's be clear, I don't. But I think it's more likely a matter of the ridiculous unnecessary work it brings to the enterprise of the English language. Again, it might be interesting to get the perspective of children and ESL students, whatever their thoughts are on this monumentally useless letter. Why don't we just remove it—25 is a much better number than 26. That way, for postal codes, each state in the US can share one letter and there are no fractions. Think about that. Post office monolith, are you listening to me? In the long run, generations from now, the figure of Q would just become an exotic meaningless shape like a bunch of those Cyrillic letters or whatnot. At least say you'll think about it.

P

With P, it's personal. After all, if I had happened to find myself among the landed aristocracy P would be all over my handkerchiefs, luggage, and pillowcases. So I have to like it by default, or seek further therapy. It's true that the letter itself bears unfortunate intimations of evacuation—#1, pee, #2, poop—even using it by name, e.g., "did you eat asparagus, your P smells funny." Yet the sound it makes (the only sound it makes, and the only letter that makes the sound, and just never mind about those combinations with H or the silent mode, as in "physics" and "psychologists") is a comical charming delight, the hollow burst of a champagne cork. It encapsulates the pop moment with uncanny perfection, for those of us who love pop—P really brings the onomatopoeia here, the insouciant way that pop music, pop art, and the pop whatnot erupt into existence, explosively, hit the vocal for a beat, and slam the door shut again just like that. Is there anything more pop than the word "pop" itself? (At the same time, this could be part of the unfortunate association with droppings.) Speaking of pop and P, however, you should be careful when you use P with a microphone. Strangely, although the P mouth noise seems so natural to me, it is not used at all in the Arabic language—and in light of that, perhaps not surprisingly, it is also not actually used that much in English, ranking at #19 in frequency of usage. A question: How is all this related to the garden vegetable I eat with a knife, done it all my life? The perspicacious truth is out there (we hope). That reminds me that princes and princesses everywhere have a certain obvious fondness for P, except for the one who complained about the garden vegetable under her super plush 20 mattresses and 20 feather-beds. Jesus, lady, get a life. Then there is the matter of minding one's Ps and Qs. What is meant by that curious phrase? Speculation includes that it stands for "pints" and "quarts," thus "please control your drinking." Another possible acronym is "prime quality." Also "please," with the Q serving as some awkward approximation of either "thank you" or "excuse me," which in general makes me think the theory is arrant nonsense—probably they all are. And I am off on fool's errands again. But now I've abandoned my own Ps and Qs by speaking in such a way. Down in the lowercase register, you have to wonder what b, d, p, and perhaps q think about one another in their crazy funhouse mirror gyrations of line and ball. Here's another question, this time about cause and effect: Are the earlier letters in the alphabet inherently more interesting, or are we more interested in them because they come first? Because I have to tell you, in the end, it looks like P just might be something of a drab and uninteresting fellow after all. There's P all over this place. Ew.

O

Oh there have to be so many ways to go with this, right? —having arrived at the fourth vowel and 15th letter of the alphabet. Coordination of the following. Considerations for the poetic "O," to which I admit I am partial, as in "O joy" (although, on conventional grounds, I really don't mind typing the H, except, you know, oh what the blasted hell is it doing there anyway). Maybe the poetic O now bears a burden of irony, but also, straight up, it's poetic. O lovely locution. O bring it on. Considerations for the orgasm, naturally. The orgasm face, to wit—the "oh face" (or is that "O face," because it's more poetical?). Considerations for Om, which rises from the belly and extends vibrations-wise into the universe. Speaking of the universe, O is among the most universal of the vowels, right? Certainly in the long version. The short version is a little more problematical, swapping around, with A, various mysterious intonations I confess I don't always hear (sometimes, both A and O, combined with U, or W, or A with itself), as in "stop," "halt," "caught," "awful," "foul," and/or "aardvark." But let that go. It's English, Jake. In O we do find one of the most beautiful letters in the perfect shape of the circle. The mystic circle. The only thing more perfect is the sphere, which O kind of approximates too. In contrast, since I brought it up, there is the masculinist upright bar of the I, and all attendant problems with ego fixation (as noted elsewhere). But among the letters there is otherwise truly no triangle, no square, no rectangle. Ironically, in some fonts the O becomes a square. That's a chortle, but more often it is the D taking the shape if any letter does. But what do I know about typefaces? I scribble in notebooks. Still, the letter O, the letter I probably, and what else? U? Here we are now at the primal levels. Does that perhaps account for why O is tucked in so relatively deep into the alphabet, all the way to the back in the second half? What is that about? Furthermore, stepping back for a little light perspective, take that third tray of letters from the alphabet the way I learned it—L, M, N, O, and P. I think there might have been a rock band called LMNOP and it's really fun to say too, or sing, as in the "ABC Song." You could almost spell out the word "lemon" if you could get that O up in front of the N. And throw in the E. Well, you know what I mean. Making lemons out of lemonade, right? Well, that's just O for you. Everywhere you want to be.

N

The letter N is a simple and solid consonant, as plain as the brown earth, representing basically only one sound and a sound that no other letter approximates or mimics. Well, oh, wait a second. There is also the "ng" formation, a kind of vocalized choking noise emulating the sounds G and N might make if they were having sex. Oh, wait, yes, note: this also applies with K, as in "thunk." Which is the sound my head makes on my desktop every time I attempt these catalogs. Because I just remembered the shenanigans N gets up to with K, G, and who knows what other letters, I can't think about it now I'm in a bit of a bad mood. I'm speaking, of course, of the so-called silent letter. Know what I mean, gnat? Can we think about this for a second? The silent letter—the silent letter? Aren't we supposed to be talking about speech here?! What are these silent letters doing all over the place?! It just makes me feel so negative. The primary sound of N is made with a vocalized pushing of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. It is similar to M, a tender grunt made with closed lips. The vocalizing enables either to be elongated at will, viz., "hmm," a feat that B, D, and other vocalized consonants can't do. But M and N are easily distinguished—one involves a compression of the lips, and the other the tongue as described above. Alphabet makers must have seen some similarity, if they put them next to one another and made their shapes so similar, even including the parallel hump shapes of the lowercases, which I neglected to mention before. The letter N is the first letter in the second half of the alphabet—and it's a long way home from here, baby. Sometimes, like a sandwich made with apostrophes, it represents "and" all on its own, e.g., "well, get in that kitchen / make some noise with the pots 'n' pans." But the letter N may be most famous now for its general air of rejection: no, non, nyet, nope, negatory, N/A, nope, nuh-uh, no way, naw I don't think so, and so forth. Compare Y. Children express negation by chanting "na-na-na" at one another. Later, as adults, they will do the same by calling one another nihilists. In scientific and mathematical formulation n is the ultimate cipher, a focal point of expression, that which we solve for. I read an article once about shopping for computers and it advised looking for the best deals at the "n - 1" level of technology, where n represented the present state of the art and "n - 1" the state of the art just before that. Some very good deals on machines there still, if you understand the market. But do I understand the market these days? I think I would have to say N.

M

I get the impression that the letter M is particularly popular among Roman numeralist mavens, especially those in the motion picture industry, who have spent something close to a century confusing us with copyright dates. Perhaps it was all worth it when the year 2000 finally arrived with that elegant formulation of "MM." Small consolation, but incidentally reminds me of the attempted promotion of M&M candies at the same time, which seemed like a natural for the new millennium but somehow never managed to take off. Maybe people just aren't that much into Roman numerals? The NFL finally figured it out with its idiotic Super Bowl numbering. As for the candy name, that finds its source in the business collaboration between Forrest Mars, Sr., who was the son of Mars candy company founder Frank C. Mars, and Bruce Murrie, who was the son of Hershey's principal William F.R. Murrie. That's an awful lot of chocolate, M, and class privilege there. M is the 13th letter of the alphabet, standing in as the termination of the first half. When I realized sometime recently that the postal abbreviation for my home state of Minnesota, MN, actually thus spans the two halves of the alphabet, it struck me as one more conceptual bifurcation of the area and my origins. MN, after all, straddles the Mississippi River at the center of the continent, and has radio stations with call letters starting with both K and W. Perhaps most obviously there is the "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and St. Paul, but also, more personally, in a kind of primal ur-bifurcation, two specific western suburbs of Minneapolis: Minnetonka, which provided my family's mailing address, and Hopkins, whose schools I attended. There were clear class divisions between the traditional, garden-style suburb of Minnetonka, formerly a resort, and the small town of Hopkins, which skewed more working class, swallowed by encroaching big city growth. But that is a topic for another time, this bifurcation. We're supposed to be talking about M here. M is more or less a natural letter. Compress the lips, sound the vocal cords—what could be easier or more primal? In fact, the sound appears to be among the first grasped at all, associated with "mama," often one of the first words learned or spoken. As an aside, I have known people to train dogs to say the word. What's interesting to me in those cases is that even though the lip movements and vocal sounds are fairly good at imitating the sound of the word, it rarely registers as a dog saying a word. The intentionality or something is missing. If anything, however, that's more likely a problem with the vowel than the consonant. Those dogs are getting the letter M right. Speaking of growling, please don't remind me of the baseball team the Seattle Mariners, often commonly known as the Ms. They are hard at work competing for status as the worst team in all baseball history, and as such they are putting this letter into a terribly embarrassing predicament. Not even M, I suspect, can get behind the Ms. And I do not blame it.

L

The letter L is impressively rational—represents one sound only (though woe to the Spanish when it is doubled), which no other letter represents. But it's interesting to me that the sound is not itself universal to all languages. At least one of the major Asian languages, Chinese or Japanese, does not use it, and attempting to teach it to adult speakers tends to produce the predictable comical results. To me, it seems a very natural sound, but when I start attempting to describe the mouth mechanics required to produce it I realize it's a bit complex after all, what with getting your tongue just so behind the front teeth. It's vocalized and it is also infinite, which we have seen so far among the consonants only with F and H, both largely unvocalized. It's easier to control the volume of the L than the surprisingly noisy hissing S. I think part of my brain is wired to appreciate the distinction between L and S because I'm abnormally sensitive to the shades of meaning between "continual" and "continuous," and have a decided preference for situations involving the former, although it's not the continuity of the sounds but the definitions that are my reason. It's like another peeve, over the word "disinterest," a similar cases of a nice connotation swamped and overrun now by bludgeoning, over-simple usage. But now we are afield of our friend the letter L. I'll tell you who else likes L and get prepared to be impressed. None other than Superman himself—yes, that's right, Kal-El of the planet Krypton, son of Jor-El and Lara. He had a thing for L the way I have a thing for K—Superman's two favorite women were Lois Lane and Lana Lang and his deadliest archenemy was Lex Luthor. Note also that his mother's name is Lara and his last name appears to be El. Now that I think about it for a second, however, why would anyone look for the sign of the L in an archenemy? Well, L is also for losers, as we all know (first finger and thumb against forehead), and Superman was usually helping some of them out, so that's probably part of the explanation too (but I'm not even sure Brainiac gets this one). I like the way L takes the 90-degree lower-left corner of a box shape, direct and no-frills, although pronunciation of the letter itself would seem to have some qualities of the frilly. Making people flip their tongues around like that. It's a good-time letter, blending seamlessly with others such as B, C, and F (and not at all, in the second position, with D, M, or N). Combining consonants with L in the first position is slightly more problematic, but done: half (oops, that's one of those mysterious "silent letters" again, isn't it? kind of like an "irrational" number), talcum (two distinct syllables there, as in "almost," so perhaps doesn't count), alms, kiln, bulb, etc. And yes, I just remembered that combining form in words like "double" and "bubble." By and large an honest workmanlike letter. Indeed, the idea of letters itself must have liked L so much that it took L for the first letter in the word "letter." LOL

K

K is my favorite letter, not least because it is worth five points in Scrabble, and 5 is my favorite number. (You'd think with my interest in letters I would play the game more, but I don't have many opportunities, and besides, I've never been much good at it.) Except when it is acting like a perfect doofus sitting out at the front of a word, only to be ignored, as is only appropriate—in "knowledge," for example—K is entirely and always simply what it is: the hard, scratching noise from the back of the throat, and a letter with a lovely, intricate, angled shape in print. I am more sorry than I can say that it has been so villainously abused by the Ku Klux Klan, which has no intrinsic right to it. It pains me deeply. I would sue them for damages if I could. As you know, I bear the letter in my last name, and over the years friends have had one, two, or more in their names, so many that I have finally come to register it as "the sign of the K," which tends to make me even more favorably predisposed to them, perhaps unconsciously. Is K actually a common letter in names, much as J is a common initial? I'm not sure, but I see it a lot. K is also a pitchers' stat in baseball for a strikeout and that's really kewl. In the '60s, filthy hippies with no respect for anything set about systematically abusing it—"Amerika," and all that, which would have grown tiresome except I also associate that with Franz Kafka, who wrote a fragment of a novel called Amerika. Franz Kafka—there's the sign of the K again, double-strength. Ken Kesey. Another one. Check that out. Emily Dickinson. See, the K exerts a quiet and subtle impact as well. I admit that the long-established relation between C and K appears to be here to stay, baffling as it is. It looks better than KK would. But really, have you ever seen such a crock? C, Mr. Third Letter in the Alphabet, the malingerer that doesn't want to choose between K and S, blatantly exploits K for cover on its K case. Back that up, CK, trick it out, and thereby jack up the absurdities. These are the kinds of things someone who really cares about K may find themselves thinking about. I mean, you can't really call K elegant. It comes with elements of the honest working class (as an entirely irrelevant aside, have you ever noticed how "honest" is dishonest about having an H?). Make no mistake. K stands in as its sound with no fuss or ambiguity (except when, as previously mentioned, it sidles up to an N at the beginning of a word, and I guess that's some kind of class issue, best considered another time, under better conditions). OK, I'm not sure what else there is to say.

J

The more unusual a letter is the more attention it calls to itself, and thus the less useful it becomes. The letter J has this problem like crazy. But I hesitate to criticize J too severely because it is the first letter of my first name after all. In fact, it is the first letter of many people's names, first and last. It appears at the beginning of names all the time—you probably know several in your own circle of friends and family. Take a moment to think. That just appears to be the milieu that J prefers. Months, for example: June, July, January. There it is again. Or consider Judy Johnson, who fell in love with Jacob Jesperson. Together they had a large family, who in turn married and had families of their own: Jimmy, Joseph, Jamie, Julia, Jasmine the elder and Jasmine the younger (technically, a cousin), Johnny Boy, Jaden "the Jukebox," Jan, Jennifer, Jacob Jr. of course, Jason (a juvenile delinquent, sadly), Jessica, actually two more Jasons plus another Jessica, Jesse (a boy), Jesse (a girl), Josie, Josh, Jacqueline known as "Jackie," Jay, and little Jago. You remember that song you used to sing around the campfire about John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt? It should have been Jones for the last name, and I think you know why. But nonetheless J is a squishy thing, taking on the exhalation of the H at times and otherwise requiring a complicated coordination of vocal sound with a specific positioning of jaw and tongue and a forward-thrusting motion that produces something like a brief vibrating hum. The primary function of J is already covered by the soft G (as in "judge") or as mentioned by the H. It's silent in a word like "marijuana" or perhaps, arguably, poses as a W in such roles (the consonant W, for those inclined to believe W is also a sometimes vowel). Speaking of marijuana, a J at one time was a joint, or marijuana cigarette; perhaps it still is in some places. Pass me the J, man. It's also a predatory bird with a striking, severe, and handsome profile, colored blue. Still and all, I keep coming back to this one detail. Why is J such a popular initial—something about the sound, perhaps? The proximity to vain I? Because it is available as a relatively unused letter? After all, it sits way down in the lowly position of #23 on the ranking of letter frequency, and brother, that is low. Because it is such an important letter in my signature I had to choose at some point, perhaps about age 12, between the very different printed and cursive forms of the capital. At first I went with the loopy balloon cursive, but ultimately I settled on the printed fishhook shape, decorating it with the handsome crossbar over the top which gives it so much panache. It's a relatively unusual letter, except for all those names in the Jesperson clan.

I

It's not hard to see that the letter I is the single most egotistical of all 26 of them, particularly given the great vowel shift in the English language in the Middle Ages. And this despite its deceptively modest appearance: a single vertical line, adorned formally top and bottom with little horizontal hat and shoes. Just a vertical line? Oh, please. It's the one letter that arrogates to itself the singular first person. When someone mentions I they are always talking about the most important person they know, every time. Then there's the little matter of the pronunciation, most especially that long I, again for the singular first person. One vocal noise is not enough for this imp, at least not since the Middle Ages. Whereas once (and still, in most European languages) we were only required to bleat "eee" in order to sound it, now we must throw an "ahh" in front of that, very nearly multisyllabic style. This is so firmly embedded that ahh-eee, for one, find that ahh-eee must take a moment and listen to what ahh-eee am saying when ahh-eee say ahh-eee. Trahh-eee it yourself. Note the jaw movement. I am also frankly puzzled how the rock star Prince, in his still handy and often useful and even prescient compressions of the language 30 years ago, for example reducing "you" to the letter U (and U know we'll be talking about that again), a favorite I believe of smartphone users everywhere now. He complicated I in a wonderfully poetic way with the graphic image of an eyeball. Not sure how much  like that in practical use, however, because 'm not sure it quite registers properly in the reading, if you see what  mean. 'm just not going to use it ever, starting now until forever. I mean it. It's just utterly, strangely counterintuitive for reading. Yet makes sense when viewed as the secret actual ego of the letter I, its id let's say, betraying its profound narcissism. Prince's I presumes itself to be the naked window to the soul itself. Nice one. It is otherwise unprepossessing, this phallic rod—9th letter of the alphabet, third vowel. But I say again: don't be fooled here. I has ambitions to be the all of everything. If you took a poll, you would find that a near absolute majority always agrees with I. These people have no scruples and fewer morals to clutter their terrible predispositions and inclinations. They only think of I. In its lowercase version it has planetary pretensions, the only letter in the English alphabet with a satellite detached yet forever attending it, that dot which you must dot as you also must cross Ts. Ha—when comes, at long last, the eclipse, I? I ask U. I blends with E to inflect the sound in either long direction—U say E-ther, I say I-ther—at random, willy-nilly, depending on the choice of the speaker. But that's neither here nor there, either.

H

Let's hear it for breathing. The letter H is a funny thing, funny peculiar not funny haha. It poses formally as an exhalation of breath, and even that is dropped at the start of words in some dialects, such as British. But then it goes behind the scenes and collaborates with other letters to pervert their purposes and its own and produce a variety of sounds, many of which, in a rational universe, would have their own unique letters. Take H with C as in, e.g., "church." Why couldn't that sound be assigned to C, which is otherwise such a shameless fraud, masquerading as K or S? Speaking of S, how about H with it, producing a sound that has only one meaning in society, aka STFU. I ask you, what does that sound have to do with either S or H (beyond a certain sibilance)? Then there is H with T, another fundamental sound element of English but also one not appearing everywhere and thus notoriously difficult for native speakers of some other languages, such as many Asian derivatives. Yet more frauds: H with G and H with P, as in "laugh" or "physiology," which are perfectly adequately covered by F. And can anyone anywhere explain the pairing with W. Wut? Oh, H, that sly shape-shifting ape-shaped letter, going on its rounds about the language, sowing trouble and confusion wherever it goes. How about that debate over the indefinite article? Some say it is without exception "a," while others argue for "an" in certain specific situations, such as "history." They seem to believe that "an history of New England" somehow sounds "better," which I happen to believe is a classist reverse-engineered artifact of that H-dropping British accent we spoke of a moment ago, which also sounds "better" to some ears. Can you detect I am an absolutist on this question? It's "a," only, for words beginning with H. Except when it is absolutely silent, as in "honor." Oh bother. Speaking of foreign noises in foreign languages, I have the impression that H in Arabic and perhaps other languages of the Middle East and elsewhere, can take on that non-vocalized rasping throat-clearing sound of the German "ch." We don't have much of that in English, the way other languages don't have much of "th." I do like the simplicity of the primary sound of H, that little exhalation of carbon dioxide. What else is close in terms of basic building blocks of the sounds a human mouth can produce? Perhaps S, or, on the vocalized front, U, by which I mean the schwa, "uhh." Hey, look, there are Hs aplenty to inflect solo vowel noises too: "ah," "eh," "oh," "uh." Quick: Which one of these things is not like the others? That's right, "eh," which is pronounced much less closely to its original vowel, usually rhyming with "gray," essentially a speech noise that asks either for confirmation of what was just said, or a request to another speaker to repeat something because the user is not sure he or she heard it correctly. H—busier with part-time work than you perhaps suspected.

G

With the letter G we reach the end of the musical scale, but most of the alphabet is still ahead, and that's something to sing about. G is another of the consonants that presumes more than a single sound to itself. There is the "soft" G, which sounds like a J, as in "judge" (and an even softer G found in "rouge"). And there is the "hard" G, a sound only this letter makes, which is a vocalized swallowing sound, a kind of spasm of regurgitation, as in "gulp." Go to the phrase "beige garage" for a look at this busy letter in action. Pretend "garage" is a verb and you can go "garaging" for a look at another sound G gets itself involved in, in combination with N. This sound is fairly common in English (it's right there in the name of the language, you see, and even in the word "language" itself), as among other things it denotes the gerund form: singing, bringing, binging (wait a sec). As with so many letters (e.g., F, X), G has found a way to be sexualized, in this case by its association with a woman's so-called G-spot, the mysterious source of non-clitoral orgasms. (Side issue: Does "orgasm" count as onomatopoeia?) G is certainly related to babies, who by reputation are always saying, "goo goo, gah gah," though I suspect relatively little documentary evidence exists for this. It is thus elemental and profoundly human, though it also seems somehow negligible. There are also times when it sits there and goes silent, as in "gnat," or "gnostic." K and P also volunteer for this psychological unknowable "function," whatever it is. And then there is the pact of silence G also holds with H, as in "right." And it can also makes an F sound, again when combined with H, as in "laugh." When does this letter sleep? In many type fonts the lowercase G is among the most beautiful of all letters, with its sense of the descender as a kind of liquid coiling pool. For all the work that it does, G doesn't have much significance on its own. Well, sometimes it can mean "thousands," in terms of money, viz., "That new boat set me back nearly 80 Gs." Astronauts seem to like G too, the way they talk about their peculiar intimacies with gravitational forces. Somehow the letter seems just a little old-fashioned now. Gee ... golly gee ... gosh golly gee ... gosh golly gee whiz, and so on. Poor little old-fashioned G, a letter already set back too far in the alphabet to distinguish easily. No one gets a G in class, and no one anywhere needs to know their GHIs. From here on out letters are more and more going to depend on the sequencing of the alphabet for their immediate identities. The second line of the alphabet in the form I learned it is FGHIJK. It's the only line with six letters; all the rest have five, probably because I and J are reasonably thin, even when they are capitalized. By contrast, G is among the biggest of all letters, so go figure.