Alphabetical (44 page)

In Webster's speller, ‘zed' became ‘zee'. I can feel a clerihew coming on:

    
Noah Webster Junior

    
in 1783

    
began the revolution:

    
he turned zed into zee.

Thirteen years later, in 1806, he stormed the barricades with the

    
Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in which five thousand words are added to the number found in the
BEST ENGLISH COMPENDS
; The
ORTHOGRAPHY
is, in some instances, corrected; The
PRONUNCIATION
marked by an Accent or other suitable Direction; And the
DEFINITIONS
of many Words amended and improved.

Out went the ‘u' in ‘favour', the ‘k' in ‘musick' (‘a Norman innovation', he claimed); the ‘re' in ‘theatre' and the ‘ce' in ‘defence' were reversed. He also took the ‘e' off ‘doctrine' and ‘discipline', turned ‘tongue' into ‘tung', ‘women' into ‘wimmen' and ‘ache' into ‘ake'. Despite its later massive success, his ideas were not initially approved. The
Albany Centinel
said it was ‘madness to endeavour to establish . . . an American or United States dialect' and Webster, they thought, had the ‘disposition to revolutionize and disorganize the English Language'.

My father's edition of
Webster's
must have been the fifth. As a child, I felt that one other feature marked it out as utterly different from the
Shorter
: its occasional small line drawings. There was a joke going round when I was about ten which was to ask people to tell you what a spiral is without moving their hands. Invariably, they end up waving and pointing. I remember looking in the
Webster's
to see what he said a spiral was. I've forgotten what Webster said, but I remember that there was one of those small line drawings to make it clear. Noah Webster Jnr couldn't do it without moving his hands either.

With the OED and
Webster's
, the two countries created what we might call their ‘pride of place' dictionaries, places that
people go to for an authoritative voice on spelling and meaning. The publishers of the OED insist that it is authoritative only because every entry can be ‘attested', i.e. shown to have really existed. The full dictionary doesn't exist in order to tell us the best words, or to exclude the worst words. For some, this isn't good enough. They see language as unruly, disturbing and ambiguous – which in some senses it is – and hope that a dictionary will lay down the law. They want dictionaries to prescribe and proscribe. You could argue that the shorter the dictionary, the more it makes its entries ‘official' through its selection of words and their definitions – albeit by implication.

In my lifetime, I've seen two revolutions in the dictionary world. In the 1960s, publishers discovered (or created) a hunger for encoding the whole world into dictionaries. Almost overnight, it seemed that you could buy cheap ‘dictionaries' of any branch of science, the arts and knowledge. Over the next twenty years or so I acquired a shelf of them, supplemented by ‘Keywords' dictionaries which isolate the fundamental concepts and offer academically reliable definitions. A cynical interpretation of this publishing bubble would say that it's a product of the need for insta-knowledge in lieu of slow study. Quick, we might have said to ourselves, what exactly is this ‘post-modernism' everyone is talking about? What exactly is this ‘rood screen' that was being mentioned in a radio programme about church architecture? Then with a speedy use of the alphabet, the word could be found, with its hundred-word definition, provided by someone reputable. Even more cynically, I might say that this was yet another blow in the victory of fact over process that has bedevilled our sense of what thought and understanding are.

In this battle, on one side are people trying to find shape and meaning in the world. On the other are those who construct quizzes, TV and radio panel games based on contestants'
memory of names, terms, dates, events and the order of sequences – or ‘facts' as these are usually called. The person who wins these is the ‘brain of Britain' or the ‘mastermind' as if being able to investigate, infer, interpret, plan, test, experiment, deduce and speculate is secondary or unimportant. Perhaps the 1960s wave of dictionaries helped create this lopsided view of the capabilities of the human mind, and, in turn, the alphabet was hijacked to assist in the breaking up of knowledge to suit this view.

The second revolution is digital and is represented by Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary. These are online dictionaries founded on a principle never tried before: that anyone can contribute. Wiktionary asks for its examples and definitions to be attested. The Urban Dictionary is not so bothered. This major change in the compilation method of the two dictionaries coincides with a second change: searching does not rely on the user using the alphabet. As it's online, you simply type the word into your search engine, and the computer does the rest by whatever invisible system computers use. (Excuse my ignorance.) We no longer have to flick pages alphabetically. Perhaps, one day, we shall see this moment of the loosening of the grip of the alphabet over the classification of knowledge as a significant turning point.

Back with that matter of the compilation method, I once witnessed an interesting confrontation between old and new school. I was at university with Jonathon Green but we disappeared out of each other's lives for many years until I started to present BBC Radio 4's
Word of Mouth
. On occasions on the programme, we talk about slang and we turn to someone who has compiled more than a handful of dictionaries of slang and jargon, Jonathon Green. Unlike the OED, Jonathon is not in the grip of Oxford's golden rule that a word must be (a) written
down, and (b) written down in a significant publication. Jonathon has given himself the freedom to include words that he's heard spoken, that others have heard spoken and which have appeared in insignificant journals. This means that he can collect much more ephemeral and recent words in use.

For one edition of the programme we invited Jonathon to meet one of the editors of the online Urban Dictionary. In a sense it was a meeting between someone who felt that his overview and knowledge of the field should count for something in the compilation of a dictionary, and someone who thought none of this mattered. In the Jonathon Green school of dictionary-compiling, no matter how slangy or vulgar the content of a dictionary might be, it should have ‘authority' and this was provided by the known person, Jonathon Green, whose record could be checked out. In a sense, this is the academic principle – every statement can be tested in terms of who is saying it and where. The editor of the Urban Dictionary was working to a completely different principle: he was just making an internationally viewable loading bay.

‘But people could make up any old word,' I said, ‘and claim that it meant, say, a provocative way of dancing the samba or whatever.' He made clear that he was utterly unfazed by that possibility. For him, a word existed whether it was in usage amongst this or that group of people, or had been invented that afternoon by Harry Harryface. What's more, if it was good and funny then Harry Harryface's word would go into circulation anyway. And isn't that what newspaper columnists, stand-up comedians, novelists . . . and, holy of holies, William Shakespeare have been doing for years?

I felt threatened. I can't speak with any certainty for Jonathon, but I suspect he was too. All the principles on which we found our sense of what is true were being overthrown by this malarkey.
How could you distinguish between what was a ‘real' piece of slang and what was just someone's ‘neologism'? The point is, the Urban Dictionary editor wasn't interested in that kind of knowledge, and, he indicated, nor were the billions who read and compile the dictionary. They were just interested readers and users, enjoying surfing the underworld of taboo words and words for taboos, looking to see if their favourites were there along with other uses that I for one couldn't name.

It's probably too early to say where all this is leading. It's not knowledge as I know it – signified by the fact that the alphabet is not needed in order to access it.

When I was ten, it occurred to me that I was learning a set of new words. These were ‘rude words'. In fact, there were so many of them, I wasn't sure I could remember them all so I started to compile a glossary. I created a very long strip of paper by sellotaping one strip of paper to another, end to end, and then I wrote each word and its definition along the strip. It included some backslang words that my little bunch of friends and I thought that we had made up. Then, I would sit in bed, feeding the strip through my fingers, reciting what I had written. I didn't list where or when I had heard or seen the word. I didn't shuffle the words into alphabetical order. I just added a word as it occurred to me or as I came across it. Its order was the chronology of the act of my writing the words. I invented the Urban Dictionary in 1956.

THE STORY OF

•
ONE AREA OF
ancient Greece had a letter ‘ksi', which was indeed an ‘X'. That's pretty well the end of the story! The letter took the usual path into our alphabet via the Etruscans, the Romans and medieval Europe.

x

Our lower-case ‘x' comes via the handwritten manuscripts of early medieval times, the ‘Carolingian minuscule' and the Italian printers of the late fifteenth century.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

It seems as if the Etruscans invented the name ‘eks' for ‘X'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

In the middle or at the end of words, it can be ‘ks' as in ‘next' and ‘vex', or it can be more like ‘kzh' as in ‘luxurious' (which, curiously, we pronounce differently when we say ‘luxury' where we pronounce the ‘x' as something like ‘ksh').

Consonants near ‘x' give us ‘lynx', ‘the Bronx', ‘excite' and the whole gamut of ‘exes' as in ‘ex-husband' and ‘ex-politician', as well as more integrated ‘ex' words as with ‘exhale', ‘extend' and ‘expert'. We have an ‘oxbow lake', the town of ‘Uxbridge' and a dialect word for ‘armpit': ‘uxter', ‘oxter' or ‘axter'.

Words that begin with ‘x' are usually of Greek origin and the ‘x' does time as a ‘z' sound: ‘xylo' means ‘wood' as in ‘xylophone'; the now-obsolete word for one of the first plastics is ‘Xylonite', a substance made very near to where I lived for many years.

For writers of alphabet poems, X is a tough slot to fill and these words are saviours along with names like ‘Xavier' and ‘Xerxes', a king whose name Edward Lear returned to several times.

‘X' also serves as a prefix letter – most famously as ‘X-ray' – but in countless other ways too, usually meaning ‘unknown' or ‘mysterious'.

Sound-play with ‘x' is a bit limited. You ‘get your kicks on Route-66', there's a children's cough medicine called ‘Tixylix' and sometimes foxes in stories are ‘foxy-woxy'.

In some Caribbean dialects the word ‘ask' is pronounced ‘ahx'. Some Londoners who are not of Caribbean origin have adopted this pronunciation too. While we're on Caribbean ‘x' words, some Caribbeans say, ‘me vex' meaning ‘I'm angry'.

X
MARKS THE SPOT

E
NGLISH DOESN'T REALLY
need the letter ‘X'. At the beginning of words, if it were replaced by a ‘Z', the pronunciation would be the same. ‘Zerxes' would sound the same as ‘Xerxes' and ‘zylophone' would sound the same as ‘xylophone'. In the middle or end of some words, if it were replaced by ‘ks', the pronunciation would be the same: ‘boks' and ‘luksury' would still work. You could write ‘exile' as ‘eggzile'. The letter mostly serves as a nod and a wink to those in the know that what is about to follow is Greek in origin. A maggot that is ‘xylophagous' will chew up wood.

Where it has become irreplaceable is when it stands on its own: ‘x' for a kiss, ‘x' for being wrong, ‘x' for the unknown in algebra, ‘x' to signify multiplication, ‘x' marks the spot, ‘x' for the vertical axis on a graph, ‘x' for ‘extra' in ‘extra large', as well as in ‘X-rated' movies and the ‘X' for ‘X-ray' and the ‘X chromosome'. In the world of entertainment and commercial products, the cluster of meanings and connotations that has grown up around the solitary ‘x' is a gift that goes on giving:
X Factor, X-Men, The X-Files, X: The Unknown
, Generation
X, X-Box, Castlemaine XXXX – and thousands more. You could make a good argument for saying that ‘X' has won the right to be called a word. Malcom X agreed: ‘For me,' he said, ‘my “X” replaced the white slavemaster name of “Little” which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.'