Alphabetical (20 page)

This is not only about trying to make letters fit animal sounds. It's about trying to fit the sounds in your language to the noise you hear the animals make. The alphabet is not a scientific representation of sounds, it's a cultural one. Take ‘ain't'. Following the rule that the apostrophe indicates a missing letter or letters of the alphabet, the longer form should, by analogy, be ‘ai not', just as the longer form of ‘haven't' is ‘have not'. But where people say ‘ain't', there isn't an ‘ai not' expression hanging about that's been shortened to ‘ain't'. It doesn't seem to be a version of any one thing, as it conjugates: ‘I ain't, you ain't, she ain't,
we ain't, you ain't, they ain't' and it can mean: ‘am not', ‘is not', ‘are not', ‘have not' or ‘has not'. There is no missing letter: ‘ain't' is really a ‘negative particle' that could be written ‘aint' or ‘aynt'. Today's Aristophaneses have decided that the new ‘colloquial negative interrogative particle' that has come into everyday speech should be written as ‘innit', rather than ‘i'n'it'. Representation of sounds has beaten typographical consistency.

Talking of apostrophes marking missing, or so-called missing, letters, George Bernard Shaw was having none of it, calling all apostrophes ‘uncouth bacilli'. When I read his play
Candida
for my A-level English exam, it was a shock to see ‘dont', and ‘cant'. So far, Shaw hasn't won the battle for the abolition of the apostrophe for missing letters, though the apostrophe for possessives is fast losing ground with people's names: e.g. St Johns Road and the like, which brings it more in line with German.

One story of the alphabet is, in a tiny way, a story of how to represent what are thought of as letters (or is it sounds?) that are believed to have gone AWOL. Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) tended to write ‘sha'n't' because he felt that the ‘ll' of ‘shall not' was missing. Again, I have to say, these letters are not missing. People make a choice about how to say things and saying ‘nt' is not ‘leaving out something', it's choosing to say ‘nt' because ‘nt' does a job for the speaker and for whoever that speaker thinks he or she is speaking to. Since we have admitted into formal prose the writing of ‘it's', ‘haven't' and the like, we can also say that this choice is also made by a writer choosing a form to do a job for him or her and for whoever that writer thinks he or she is writing for. Lewis Carroll exposed an inconsistency in the rule: an apostrophe marks the missing letter(s) but, interestingly, he wasn't able to get the rest of us to do the same.

So, who decides? Aristophanes had won himself a position of such prestige that he was entitled to invent a transliteration of frog noises and no one could stop him. In ‘D is for Disappeared Letters', we saw that the people called ‘French scribes' hacked away at the Old English alphabet, replacing letters with ‘gh' and the like. The history of spelling could fill a book, but in brief we can say that up until Samuel Johnson's dictionary in 1755, these things were mostly decided by London printers. They owned the presses in the commercial, legal and executive centre of England; they did the printing, they had the power. Dictionaries, in particular the
Oxford Dictionary
, ruled for many years after Johnson, but from the twentieth century onwards, other powers have forced their way in. People who own businesses and those they hire to create their logos, letterheads, product design and advertising copy have made up their own rules.

I spent many hours being taught (and forgetting) how to lay out an address at the top of a letter and on an envelope. Some of this was about punctuation and layout but some of it was also alphabetical. Here is the rule: on an envelope, when writing to a man, you must write after his name, ‘Esq.' Millions of young people were taught this for seventy years or so. It was the rule. We were examined on it. Some children were beaten for getting it wrong. Others were rewarded for doing it beautifully. Then it stopped. It wasn't modified. No one said that perhaps it didn't need to be a capital ‘E', or that perhaps it would be more logical to use the whole word, ‘Esquire'. It just stopped. A piece of alphabetical work just ground to a sudden halt. What was a rule one day stopped being a rule the next. There was now no rule.

This happened because of the stuff going on above the radar. This was due partly to the slow but steady decrease in the use
of formal methods of address, and partly to the rise in functionalist minimalism in the business world's typography. Where addresses once slanted to the right, they were now justified to the left margin; where there were commas after numbers and at the end of lines, now there were none; where there were full stops after Mr and Mrs, now there were none. Perhaps there is a document somewhere explaining how much printer's ink and secretaries' time this saved. In truth a justification wouldn't matter much, because this was also about effect: we are a clean, new, efficient outfit; we don't mess about with commas and esquires. When those with the power break the rules, they may get told off by sticklers, but the rule changes anyway.

The capital-letter–full stop/exclamation mark/question-mark rule for sentences and questions doesn't apply to posters. They're mostly present in the Victorian era but by the time of the First World War, the picture is mixed: ‘Fling the Kaiser's insult back in his teeth by making the “little” Army
BIGGER
– you can't make it
BRAVER
' came out at the same time as: ‘78 Women and Children were killed and 228 Women and Children were wounded by the German Raiders
ENLIST NOW
.' By the Second World War these conventions were virtually all gone: ‘your
BRITAIN
fight for it now'. No need for full stops or capital letters on posters had become a new rule.

For centuries, there have been other traditions, acting for a lot of the time below the radar, away from the academy – popular, subversive or avant-garde – and they have experimented with the alphabet too. Sometimes these strands are taken up by the authorities – which is what happened with Second World War posters, which incorporated surrealism, the Arts and Crafts movement and many others.

Once sufficient numbers of people could read, then the poster
became a pleasure park for the alphabet, appealing, coaxing, commanding, seducing and cajoling audiences to look, follow, act, laugh, cry as required. The French Revolution was announced on the street in red, white and blue, roman serif print, ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ou la Mort' (‘Liberty, equality, fraternity or death'). Political movements and calls to fight in wars more often than not seemed to want their letters to shout and match the muscularity of their images of upright, marching figures.

One way in which the alphabet broke away from its conventions was with the speech bubble. In Europe, the first representations of some kind of speech attached to the speaker's mouth appear on illuminated manuscripts as early as the tenth century. These are usually lines from the Bible in Latin, written on banners (‘banderoles') or on scrolls.

It's as if the scribes could not believe that writing could appear on anything other than places where writing was found in real life! The secular world got hold of the technique and started to produce cheap satirical prints, with vernacular speech graphically attached to the speaker. In the sixteenth century, there is an explosion of cheap prints full of asses, monkeys, pigs and owls representing popes, Jews, fools and the rest, most of them with speech scrolls and banners, with mocking and self-mocking words. This was the moment that the alphabet was launched on the people as a whole. Though at home and at church it served to teach the Bible, liturgy and prayers, in the streets it was at work satirizing and telling stories in the cheap ‘penny' literature, a tradition that ran from the early 1500s through to the early 1800s. In Britain, in the eighteenth century, the cartoonists and engravers Gilray, Rowlandson and Hogarth filled their pages for a largely middle-class readership, with caricatures of real or imagined contemporary types, and around them huge
speech bubbles, jam-packed with seemingly handwritten letters, spewed forth great speeches revealing the characters' stupidity.

Print and image combined has been a fruitful playground for many other alphabet improvisers. We are so familiar with ‘kapow', ‘vroom', ‘blam' and the rest that it's easy to forget that people had to invent the idea that you could accompany actions with the letters of a supposedly related noise next to the image itself. These are the cousins of the many exclamations that people make in comics too: ‘Gasp!', ‘Blerg!', ‘Sigh!', ‘Erk!' and, as I remember from my childhood, the noise that the Mekon, ruler of the evil Treens, made when Dan Dare punched his enormous green head: ‘Grunkle!'

The person who made it a regular feature was Roy Crane (1901–77), who started a strip called ‘Washington Tubbs II', later shortened to ‘Wash Tubbs' when he enlarged the strip into a full-page comic adventure series. It was in this format that he invented the new language and lettering we associate with comics: ‘bam', ‘pow', ‘wham', ‘ker-splash' and ‘lickety-wop' amongst them.

Lettering could be used as a parody. One of the most successful was George Cruikshank's mock banknote, which imitated the curly script of the current banknote. In 1818, Cruikshank had passed by a public hanging and was appalled to see that a woman was being executed for ‘passing' a counterfeit banknote. Cruikshank's note displays a row of hanged men and is ‘signed' by J. Ketch, the hangman. The popularity of this squib is said to have contributed to the abolition of the death penalty for the passing on of forged notes.

In ‘F is for Fonts', I mentioned the effect of Letraset on those of us involved in writing and producing magazines and
newspapers in the 1960s, which meant that the alphabet as a tool could be drawn, clipped, mocked, enlarged, shrunk, or reversed in a hundred different ways. Some preferred to use other methods: silkscreen, woodcut, linocut. On the one hand new kinds of Gilray art appeared, the paper seeming to crawl with grotesque images of enlarged bits of the body, guns, bombs, dogs, or army helmets, while, intermingled with it, vast amounts of text, handwritten in capital letters, seemed to typify an era of thousands of new words and new forms of speech which were needed to change the world. On the other hand, another kind of stark, highly economic script appeared, sometimes laid over Matisse-like images of a hand, a factory, a fist, a tank. Matching this, graffiti moved out of toilets on to walls, written at first in chalk or slapped on with white paint. The wittiest plucked the words from one source and adapted them to the new one. ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz' was turned by students raging at arbitrary university justice into ‘Deanz meanz finez'.

As if that wasn't a big enough bull in the china shop, along came Punk: ‘anarChy in The Uk!' was written with real or mocked-up cut-out letters, most of which (apart from the ‘U' of ‘Uk') looked as if they had been cut out of the posh source,
The Times
newspaper. Cheap fanzines were produced which were made to look as if they were created at the back of a classroom. Some were. When typewriter typefaces had ‘dropped' letters, these were hand-drawn back on and printed like that. Photographs of official figures or the singers themselves were drawn on or labelled. Lou Reed's photo appeared as if he had written on his own face. What had been started by Marcel Duchamp and the
Mona Lisa
in the rarefied environment of Parisian art galleries was now being carried forward by anyone who felt like doing it. The alphabet itself was desecrated. No
form in which it appeared was safe. There were virtually no places it could not now crop up.

The present era's experimentalists inherit the possibilities created by all these forerunners. Graffiti lettering has turned into a worldwide art form, with the entry of every city, by road or rail, informing us of the presence of ‘This Guy', ‘LBJay' and a million gangs. The letters sometimes look like squashed fruit – it's the effect of the spray-can technique. When my son died, the day after, a graffito appeared on the concrete wall by the motorway near his home, saying his name. The huge yellow letters folded into each other and the name as a whole looked as if it had been splatted into a syrup. Occasionally, someone has decided to break the pattern and use gigantic stencils, just as I remember a student doing when he sprayed a perfectly matching ‘I' in the middle of a giant ‘
TO LET
' sign on the side of a new tower block development.

For the time being, some of the most unusual and experimental work with the alphabet is being done in the ‘straight' world of magazines, book covers, children's books and commercial ads. The internet tends to constrain the informal interchange between people to the unchangeable typefaces of Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums. In children's books, Sara Fanelli and Lauren Child have used the computer to wind words round and through the pictures so that the letters look as if they are part of the action. Oliver Jeffers draws his text as if he's writing as he's thinking it. As you read it, you get the impression that he doesn't know what to do next, which is the state of mind of some of his characters.

Strangely, the world of cartoons, posters, badges and T-shirts has, if anything, got a lot more sober since the explosions of the 1960s and Punk. In 1807, you could get a silver badge with ‘
WILBERFORCE FOR EVER
' engraved on it. The letters of ‘
FOR EVER
'
fit snugly into the open arms of a laurel wreath, promising victory to the named person. Now, you can make up your own slogans and gags for badges and T-shirts as much as you like. You can put on cheeky, obscene, subversive, drunken, lascivious messages to your heart's content. You're likely to get them made up in a store that will do it for you from a fixed set of typefaces, in the right order, very neatly and professionally. No matter what they say or mean, they will still look more like ‘
WILBERFORCE FOR EVER
' than Lou Reed's graffiti'd face.