Alphabetical (14 page)

Cummings used letters to represent the accent, dialect, tempo, pulse, compressions, self-interruptions and volume of a speaker. In ways that are now commonplace in poetry, comics, drama and advertising, he played with our upper–lower-case expectations about letters. Cummings got his fair share of scorn, as when the critic Colin Wilson wrote: ‘the really serious case against Mr. Cummings's punctuation is that the results which it yields are ugly. His poems on the page are hideous.'

In my late teens, I carried my Penguin
Selected Poems
edition of his poetry around with me in my pocket, hoping that some of its modernity would end up stuck to me. Cummings acquired some of that avant-garde-ish position by hanging out in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. He got the taste of Paris from a spell there in the US Army Ambulance Corps during the First World War, though some letters in which he expressed anti-war sentiments resulted in him being held in a military detention camp for more than three months. At this point in his life, it's fair to say he was an oppositionist in deed, word, page layout and orthography.

When he chose to use the alphabet to represent in poetry non-standard ways of speaking, he was drawing on long-standing traditions of making letters respond to non-standard forms of speech.

He also tried to do something more than simply spell things in different and new ways. He tried to create a pattern on the page
with the look of the letters. This business of drawing attention to the shapes of letters, the shapes they can make, the shapes you can pour them into, are all part of the repertoire of what came to be called in the 1950s ‘concrete poetry'.

There are many starting points for this way of treating letters, most giving credit to the ancient Greeks who played with the idea of writing poems that fit into the shape of the subject of the poem – wineglasses and the like. The metaphysical Welsh poet George Herbert wrote a religious poem called ‘Easter Wings' in the shape of wings (first published in 1633). In the Islamic tradition of the Bismala or Bismilla, for centuries Muslims have been using the visual qualities of the Arabic alphabet, versions of which you can sometimes see hanging from the mirrors of Muslim cab drivers. In Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
there is the ‘long and sad tale' of the mouse, which expresses visually what is being said in the poem. Apollinaire dubbed them ‘Calligrammes'.

Concrete poetry has now burgeoned into a worldwide game, with people swapping these visual word and letter plays online, while teachers find that children can quickly adopt and adapt the many different visual tricks. People who like classifying things slot these into categories. I show children that you can write the word ‘play' with a loopy ‘y' and turn that ‘y' into a swing; you can write the word ‘look' and put eyes into the ‘o's; you can write the word ‘zoo' so that the letters are very long and tall, forming bars, then put a speech bubble coming out from between the bars that says, ‘Let me out'; you can make the letters of ‘bed' make a bed, the letters of ‘bridge' make a bridge, and so on.

In the 1960s, concrete poets did something different: they used the visual quality of words and letters being repeated across a page. I remember a German poem which repeated the word for
‘apple' in an apple shape, and erasers that erased letters. The Scots poet Edwin Morgan imitated print-outs in order to convey the imagined mechanical speech of a computer with his famous ‘Computer's Christmas Carol'. Some poets went even more abstract and used the letters as a painter might use a repeated motif. Sometimes this produces new words, so in German the word ‘luz', meaning ‘light', when repeated with no spaces starts to look like ‘zulu'. This is the visual equivalent of that oral game that children play where they get you to push your fingers through your hair repeating the word ‘leaf' – it starts to sound like ‘flea'. Just as repetition produces both sound and visual rhythms, you can also create gaps and surprises in anything regular. A gap in a repeated pattern of the word ‘silence' becomes a silence.

One continuous line of visual play with letters is the monogram, a miniature concrete poem. My brother's initials are B. R. R. He discovered that he could lay the three letters over each other in a neat fit. All the minor accoutrements of his schooling were covered in this natty monogram: exercise books, rulers, school bag, sports kit . . . One pleasure in monograms is the element of disguise coming from the fact that the letters so intertwine and mingle as to conceal the true identity. Mine are M. W. R. Laying the ‘W' over the ‘M' gives you an ‘M' with a ‘V' stuck on the side but there's nowhere pleasing for the ‘R' to go. The monogram ends up looking like a box waving for help.

The alphabet developed so that when we write we can represent most of the sounds we make in the order we say them. Monograms can often defy this by not revealing the order in which the letters appear in our names. Old London schools display a monogram using the letters S, B and L. Is it the London School Board or the School Board for London? Either way, it's a memory of a great democratic institution I enjoy being reminded of. (It was the School Board for London.)

It's thought that monograms were invented by the authorities of the cities in ancient Greece, one being found in the city of Archaea combining the letters ‘alpha' and ‘chi' from as early as 350
BCE
. It is Greek letters which provided one of the world's most famous monograms, the so-called ‘chi-ro' sign. This is a fine example of how most forms of language we see and hear are a consequence of evolution – a mixture of continuation and variation, arising out of adaptation to the needs of its users. So, the letter ‘chi' is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ and ‘ro' is the second. Superimpose the one over the other and you get the ‘chi-ro' symbol. But all is not quite as it seems, as the symbol pre-dates Christ. That's because the Greek word for ‘good' also begins with the letters ‘chi' and ‘ro', and Greek scribes used to use the ‘chi-ro' symbol to indicate that a passage of writing was good or useful or worthy in some way.

The ‘chi-ro' symbol was also taken up by King Ptolemy III, who ruled over Egypt from 246 to 222
BCE
. It seems as if his press office cunningly arranged for the symbol to be put on coins, so that every time you bought yourself a papyrus you were reminded of how good the king was. Nearly 500 years later, it was the act of the Roman Emperor Constantine taking on the symbol which married ‘chi-ro' to Christianity, though its first probable purpose was to help Constantine win wars.

In this long history, declaring yourself with a monogram has been especially popular with the aristocracy and with painters. So we can define ourselves not only with our names. A monogram on your exercise book, embroidered on to your sheets, or tucked away in the corner of your painting is about a kind of self-actualization – making yourself real, making yourself known to the world. What's strange, though, is that we can do this with the letters of a monogram, as these letters aren't doing the usual alphabetic job – suggesting the sounds and
combinations of sounds of words. They are signs that lead only to the initial letter of names. And these are not usually the exact sound that our names begin with. In my brother's case, we say ‘bee' but his name is Brian. It's not even as if he was ever known by the three initials, so even saying the letters doesn't relate to the sounds that usually identify him. No one calls me M. W. R. The monogram uses the alphabet, but not for its usual purpose. The monogram is about alphabetic display armed with interference.

THE STORY OF

•
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'.