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The Secret Lives of LETTERS

A

the capital A
hasn’t always
looked the way
it does now. In ancient
Semitic languages, the
letter was upside down,
which created a symbol
that resembled a steer
with horns.

B

Grab paper and
pen and start
writing down
every number as a
word. Do you notice
one missing letter? If
you kept going, you
wouldn’t use a single
letter b until you
reached one billion.

C

Benjamin Frank-
lin wanted to
banish c from the
alphabet—along with j,
q, w, x, and y—and replace them with
six letters he’d invented
himself. He claimed
that he could simplify
the English language.


D

Contrary to
popular belief,
the D in D-day
does not stand for
“doom” or “death”—it
stands for “day.” The
military marks impor-
tant operations and
invasions with a D as a
placeholder. (So June 5,
1944, was D-1.)


E

meet the “Smith”
of the English
alphabet—e is
used more often than
any other letter. It
appears in 11 percent
of all words, according
to an analysis of more
than 240,000 entries in
the Concise Oxford
English Dictionary.


F

Anyone educated
in today’s school
system knows
that the lowest grade
you can get is an F. The
low-water mark, however  used to be  represented by the letter E.
When Mount Holyoke College administrators
redesigned the grading
system in 1898, profes-
sors worried that stu-
dents would think the
grade meant "excellent"F more obviously
stands for “fail.”


G

Both G and C
were originally
represented by
the Phoenician symbol
gimel, which meant
“camel.” It was the
Romans who finally
separated the two
letters, letting C keep
its shape and adding a
bar for the letter G.


H

The Brits have
long had an h
hang-up, according to Michael
Rosen, author of Alphabetical How Every Letter Tells a Story. They
pronounce h two ways:
“aitch” and “haitch.”
Accents that dropped
the h from words were
once considered lower
class, Rosen writes.
And in Northern Ireland pronunciation
distinguished Catholics
(“haitch”) from Protestants (“aitch”).


I

Funnily enough,
the dot over the
letters i and j has a
funny-sounding name:
It’s called a tittle.


J

this is one of the
two letters that do
not appear on the
periodic table. (Q is
the other.) Invented in
the 1500s by an Italian,
j was also one of the
last letters to be added
to the alphabet.


K

With the possi-
ble exception
of L (see below),
K is the most notorious
letter in sports. It’s how
baseball fans record
a strikeout. (When the
first box score was
written back in 1859,
S was used to indicate
a sacrifice; K was
plucked from the end
of struck.)



L

The National
Football League
has traditionally
used Roman numerals
to denote the number
of the Big Game, but for
the 50th Super Bowl,
they decided to go with
just the number 50. Why? Sports fans use
the letters W and L as
shorthand for “win”
and “loss.” Because the
Roman numeral for
50 is L, the NFL worried
that Super Bowl L
would be, in PR terms,
a big loser.


M

You can’t say
the letter m
without your
lips touching. Go ahead
and try it!


N

The letter n
was originally
associated with
water—the Phoenician
word for n was nun,
which later became
the Aramaic word for
“fish.” In fact, the capital N got its shape be-
cause it was a pictorial
representation of a
crashing wave.


O

Only four
letters (a, e, l, o)
are doubled at
the beginning of a
word (aardvark, eel,
llama, ooze, etc.),
and more words start
with double o in English than with any
other pair.


P

this may be the
most versatile
letter in English.
It’s the only consonant
that needs no help in
forming a word sandwich with any vowel:
pap, pep, pip, pop, pup



Q

One out of
every 510 letters
in English words
is a q, making it the
least common letter in
the English alphabet,
according to a Concise
Oxford English
Dictionary analysis.


R

sometimes
referred to as
the littera canina,
or the canine letter,
because Latin speakers
trilling it sound like a
growling dog, r gets a
shout-out from William
Shakespeare in Romeo
and Juliet when Juliet’s
nurse calls the letter
“the dog’s name” in act
2, scene 4.


S

The English
alphabet briefly
included a letter
called a “long s.” Used
from the late Renaisance to the early 1800s, it resembled
the letter f but was
pronounced as an s.
You’ll see it in various
manuscripts written
by the Founding
Fathers, including
the Bill of Rights.


T

The term T-shirt
refers to the T
shape of the garments body and
sleeves. F. Scott Fitzgerald is believed to be the
first to use the term in
popular culture, in
1920, when the main
character in his novel
This Side of Paradise
brings a T-shirt with
him to boarding school.




U

Before the
1500s, u and v
were used interchangeably
 as a vowel
or a consonant. A
French educational reformer
 helped change
that in 1557 when he
started using u exclusively
 as a vowel and
v as the consonant.



V

this is the
only letter in
the English
language that is never silent. Even usually
conspicuous letters
such as j and z are
silent in words we have
borrowed from foreign
languages, such as
marijuana (originally a
Spanish word) and
laissez-faire (French).




W

Ever wonder
why we call
it a double-u
instead of double-v?
The Latin alphabet
did not have a letter
to represent the w
sound in Old English,
so seventh-century
scribes just wrote it as
uu. The double-u symbol
 eventually meshed
together to form the
letter w.



X

From “X marks
the spot” to
“solve for x,” this
is the go-to letter to
represent something
unknown. The idea is
believed to have come
from mathematician René Descartes, who
used the last three
letters of the alphabet
to represent unknown
quantities in his book
The Geometry. He chose
a, b, and c to stand for
known quantities.




Y

the switch-
hitter in the
alphabet, y
functions as both a
vowel and a consonant.
The Oxford English
Dictionary actually
calls it a semivowel
because while the letter
stops your breath in
words such as yell and
young—making it a
consonant—it also
creates an open vocal
sound in words such as
myth or hymn.




Z

Believe it or not,
the letter z has
not always been
the last letter of the
alphabet. For a time,
the Greeks had zeta in
a respectable place at
number seven.




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