Alphabetical (24 page)

Word-play with ‘l' gives us ‘lull', ‘lullaby', ‘la-la land', ‘doo-lally', ‘lolly', the ‘Lilo' bed, the way to sing a tune – ‘la, la, la, la . . .', ‘Lola', ‘Lily', ‘Lulu', ‘Tallullah', ‘Hallelujah', ‘lily-livered', ‘Lilibullero', ‘loll', ‘lollop', the Scots' word ‘peely-wally', ‘willy-nilly', ‘silly-billy', ‘hillbilly', the Australian word for a tiny tornado – a ‘willy-willy', Sir Toby Belch's exclamation – ‘Tilly-vally, lady!', the children's literature character ‘Milly-Molly-Mandy', ‘pell-mell', ‘dilly-dally', ‘jelly-belly', ‘mellow-yellow', ‘live and let live', ‘let sleeping dogs lie,' ‘Polly-wolly-doodle all the day . . .'

‘He who laughs last laughs longest' or ‘he had the last laugh'.

L
IS FOR LSD

A
S CHILDREN WE
are taught our letters and then taught how to stretch them into longer and longer words (‘A is for Ant and Apple and Aardvark' and so on). As adults we go back the other way and scatter our speech with letters to represent the long words and complicated things we can't be bothered to say. Much initials-use is a kind of slang. They are popular, colloquial ways of speaking and writing, sometimes as a private lingo, sometimes as a way of marking that you and your listeners are in the know, sometimes as a way of excluding those who don't. Of course, some are so widespread they have moved into the mainstream – so much so that saying the full term sounds pedantic. There are very few occasions in Britain when you would say ‘Automobile Association', other than to distinguish it from Alcoholics Anonymous – ‘I broke down on the M25 and called the AA' isn't likely to mean that I had had a panic attack and wanted a drink. As with a lot of use of initials, a subtle dance of the ‘articles' (‘a', ‘the', or neither) is going on here. ‘The AA' is cars, ‘AA' is alcohol.

Initials represent objects in an adult world not to be mentioned
in front of the kids. Swear words are defused and drugs are coded when reduced to single letters. The first few times I heard people talking about LSD in the 1960s, I thought that they had simply switched from using the contemporary slang for money – ‘bread', ‘dough', ‘readies', ‘dosh' – to £sd. I knew several people at that time who transformed their speech overnight and I often felt I was off the pace. I was eventually told that LSD was lysergic acid diethylamide, a name that I can never remember and had to look up to write here. Those initials work: they do their job so well that I don't have the ability or the will to maintain their link to words.

Invented as a cure for depression, LSD was once trialled as a weapon. My last job as a BBC trainee involved looking through film archives of anything or anyone connected to chemical warfare. I came across a black-and-white clip that showed a US soldier on an assault course, being given LSD by his officers, repeating the assault course and then being interviewed. It was distressing to watch because the soldier started flopping about, stumbling and mumbling. When he was interviewed at the end, he talked gobbledegook. The clip was used in a programme called
The Toxic Club
, but – to use another set of famous initials – the US government got in touch and asked for it be removed for the next showing. Talking about LSD being administered to US soldiers was too toxic.

The £sd symbol had become so detached from its roots that I don't think I ever knew what the letters stood for. I'm not even sure that I thought ‘£' was a letter. I thought of it more as a magic sign, symbolic of loads of dosh. Because we're not in the Eurozone, the symbol survives, a strange desiccated version of the curly upper-case ‘L' it once was. The letters stand for ‘librae', ‘solidi' and ‘denarii', and the reason why the coinage bore Latin names is down to Charlemagne who decreed it as part of his
role as the Holy Roman Emperor. As one wag said, the Holy Roman Empire wasn't holy, it wasn't Roman and it wasn't an Empire but Charlemagne still seemed to have acquired enough power for people to do what he told them to to do.

That's why my daily arithmetic lessons derived from the fact that according to Charlemagne – as decreed in around
AD
793 – twelve denarii equalled one solidus, and 240 denarii equalled one libra. With the £ sign being, to my mind, magic, and the ‘s' standing for, as I thought, ‘shilling', my problem was with the ‘d'. How could it mean penny? ‘P' for penny, surely. It was an adult screw-up, I decided, but went along with it. We saw ‘8d'; we said ‘eightpence'. I never heard anyone saying, ‘8D'. But then no one said ‘denarii', ‘solidus' and ‘libra'. Money in Britain was once mostly in the hands of Latin- and French-speaking people yet the lower-class names won out: penny, shilling and pound. For a while, it must have been a deal: we'll have the names, you can have the initials; just as we rear ‘hogs', you eat ‘pork'.

The Romans were keen initializers and abbreviaters. All Roman numerals are represented by letters. ‘IC' was ‘Julius Caesar' (pronounced ‘Yoolius' with the ‘Y' sound at the beginning indicated by the letter ‘I'). Roman memorial stones are covered in initials and through the long use of Latin there are hundreds of examples.

Today, Latin phrases pass about between us obscured behind initials. ‘AD' is ‘anno domini'; ‘pd' is ‘per diem'; ‘PS' is ‘post scriptum'; ‘a.m.' is ‘ante meridiem'; ‘BA' is ‘baccalaureus artium'; ‘e.g.' is ‘exempli gratia'; ‘i.e.' is ‘id est'; ‘NB' is ‘nota bene'; ‘RIP' is ‘requiescat in pace' and so on, ad infinitum or ad nauseam. The Periodic Table, learned by heart and recited by millions of secondary-school students, is made up of Latin initials. Important for old Hollywood movies: ‘SPQR' on the Roman banners is
‘Senatus populusque Romanus', with ‘que' – meaning ‘and' – on the end of ‘populusque' getting full status as ‘Q'. It means ‘the Senate and People of Rome', which doesn't sound terribly militaristic.

For Christians, the initials ‘INRI' derive from ‘Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum' (‘Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews'). John 19: 20 states that this was written in three languages – Hebrew, Latin and Greek – and was put on the cross of Jesus. Quite who thought that Jesus really was the King of the Jews is another matter. My father once tried to convince me that ‘INRI' was the cockney version of ‘Henry'.

Initial letters as intricate, decorated, emblematic images in themselves appear on illuminated manuscripts throughout the medieval period. When we look at them hundreds of years later, the scribes' illumination seems at least in part about making the letters themselves sacred. Surrounding them with saints, animals, mythical creatures and ornate designs and patterns puts the letter on a pedestal. I don't suppose this is the immediate intention; the manuscript or volume as a whole is what is sacred, and the initial letters are the means to producing that end.

Today illuminated manuscripts are usually in glass cases in museums or churches with two pages on show, where we see perhaps only one or two illuminated letters. As a result, a solo letter takes on a special importance, displaying (showing off, perhaps) a bewildering range of skills. Was there something special about the beginning of a page or paragraph? Was there a particular importance in the idea of being an initial? In the historical root of writing, initializing names of things was one of the ways in which writing developed. Mythically and religiously, the idea of first and last, alpha and omega, has a particular importance. Jesus's words, as reported in the Gospels, have
several key references to beginnings and ends and John famously starts: ‘In the beginning was the word.' The gilded manuscripts appear to be saying, ‘In the beginning was the illuminated initial.'

In Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night
, Malvolio the Puritan is mocked for his stereotypically Puritan attempts at interpreting letters and handwriting. He comes across a letter which he thinks has come from his employer, the gentlewoman Olivia, but the letter is a forgery placed there by the group who want to pull him down a peg. First, like Thomas Phelippes (see ‘
C is for Ciphers
') he tries to crack the code of the letters ‘M', ‘A', ‘O' and ‘I', which he assumes represent his own name, Malvolio. He reckons he can spot Olivia's distinctive hand as he reads out the letters ‘C', ‘U' and ‘T' to which he adds: ‘and thus makes she her great P's'. Shakespeare's audience laughed as the Puritan is made to speak of things that he would normally repress. Puritans believed that talking out loud of the body and its functions caused lust, lasciviousness, lechery, debauchery and idleness.

Shakespeare's sonnets are dedicated to ‘Mr. W. H.', a person who has never been identified. This may be a joke, a cunning disguise or a misprint. At the bottom of the page there are two more initials, ‘T. T.', which correspond to the printer's name, Thomas Thorpe. All this has given rise to Initials Frenzy. Thousands of scholars, writers and celebrities have pored over the dedication, offering reasons, stratagems, jokes and candidates. These last include a string of people whose initials are W. H. (of course), also an H. W., and even a W. S., namely Shakespeare himself. For those who prefer to see Shakespeare devoting himself to aristocrats, there is the problem of that irritating ‘Mr' slotted in before the ‘W. H.' which rather suggests that W. H. was a commoner like Shakespeare himself. The idea of a commoner writing sonnets to another commoner or being
grateful to another commoner, as the dedication suggests, is a step too far for some.

The modernist poet, Hilda Doolittle, published her work as ‘H. D.' and, around the same time, George William Russell published his poems as ‘Æ' (sometimes written as ‘AE' or ‘A. E.'). This seems to have been less a matter of disguise, more a matter of modernist minimalism.

More usually, the role of initials for writers, politicians and people in the public eye is as decoration of the surname. In showbiz, the clash of cymbals or a quick chord is called a ‘sting'. Perhaps initials in the following names are a verbal sting: H. G. Wells, N. F. Simpson, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, P. J. Harvey and let's have an extra sting for J. R. R. Tolkien. Americans have been fond of slotting in a middle initial – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower. George W. Bush's middle initial became so important that it became him: ‘Dubya', thereby distinguishing him from his father, George Bush, but, unfortunately for him, suggesting a kind of baby-talk.

Part of the complex systems of naming that rap stars use is a set of symbolic and playful initials: P-Diddy, Run-DMC, Ice-T, LL Cool J., Jay-Cool, Jay-Z and thousands of others. Eminem (Marshall Bruce Mather III) plays with at least two jokes with his name: it's a spelling out of a version of M. M. (his own initials); and M&Ms are iconic sweets in the US. If there is one thing that Eminem most definitely is not, it is some kind of colourful candy. Of course writing out ‘Eminem' is a playful disruption of the usual way of writing initials, anyway. His use of the ‘mf profanity' in his lyrics won him the nickname ‘Eminef'. His constant writing and singing about relatives and friends has won him something else: a raft of law suits where he can't pretend that he's not Eminem.

Some people suffer from another kind of initial-itis and their
career or status calls on them to display their qualifications, awards and membership of professional associations, most of which come as initials, with the occasional non-initial abbreviation thrown in. Occasionally these are bogus or meaningless. One of the oldest worthless ones is ‘MA Oxon'. It sounds as if it's a Master of Arts, a high honour from my old university, Oxford, whereas it is no higher than a BA. You just potter back to university a few years after collecting your BA and buy yourself an MA.

If you or I list the initials we've known and used in our lives, they act as markers of who we are. You could tell the history of your life through the initials of: your own name, the names of others in your family, your schools and colleges, items of technology that came into public view during your life, your qualifications, the associations, clubs and political parties that you've belonged to, the names of authors, performers, musicians you've followed, your diseases and medicines.

Highlights of mine include the fact that my brother's initials B. R. coincided with the ‘BR' of British Railways, which meant that the antimacassars hanging over the seats in first-class train carriages were a temptation for him. Our uncle was in on the early days of colour TV technology and was invited to the House of Lords to demonstrate the latest advances. It seems that he and his colleagues were left alone in a room to wait for their lordships to see them, and the sight of a heavy-duty ashtray with the insignia ‘GR' was a lure for one of them – obviously not for my uncle. However, it somehow or another came into our possession and it sits on the desk next to me as I write now. It was a few years before I discovered that ‘GR' wasn't ‘grrrr' but ‘Georgivs Rex'.

When I first went to work at the BBC, it hadn't yet become ‘the Beeb' – an Eminem-type/Dubya-type transformation of initials into a pseudo-word. Every management position
benefited from a set of distinctive initials. ‘HST' or ‘head of staff training' is the one I remember the best, partly because he was technically my boss but also because of the most stressful sign I know: ‘HST STOP', which you see on the platform at Euston Station. It means ‘High-Speed Train, stop,' which I think a driver ought to know when to do without having to read a sign telling him to.