Alphabetical (45 page)

Part of the story of the settlement of the US is told with the letter ‘X'. In the seventeenth century, the majority of people who settled in North America came as ‘indentured servants' and many of these were illiterates who signed their papers with an ‘X'.

The deal was this: to get to America had a price. If you worked for free when you got there, you could pay off the cost of the trip. The typical term for this indenture was four or five years but it could be for as little as one year or as much as seven. Some people went willingly. The Xs on the indenture papers don't tell us which. Some people were kidnapped and, if they were children, their papers would be signed by others. On arrival in America, the servants could be sold.

The
Pennsylvania Gazette
of 17 August 1774 carried this advertisement: ‘Just imported, on board the Snow Sally . . . a number of healthy, stout English and Welsh Servants and Redemptioners . . . farmers and labourers, and some lively smart boys, fit for various other employments, whose times are to be disposed of. Enquire of the Captain on board the vessel, off Walnut-street wharf.'

For the strong and the lucky, that ‘X' on their indenture papers could mean a few years of hardship followed by freedom, some land and possible prosperity. For others it was a form of slavery which they didn't survive. The system started in the 1620s and continued till 1917. Peter Williamson, one famous survivor of a kidnapping in Aberdeen, lived long enough to return to
Scotland and sue his kidnappers. In December 1763, in the Edinburgh Court of Session, Williamson was awarded £200 damages plus 100 guineas' legal costs against Bailie William Fordyce who was found to have been personally responsible for the kidnapping.

Thousands of ‘X's helped build America. Thousands of ‘X's perished before they could.

It's easy to see why ‘X' was a favoured symbol for the unlettered: two strokes of a pen or pencil seem more precise and definite than a single stroke. Indeed, the point of intersection of the two strokes takes on special significance when plotting graphs – or, much more importantly, when playing Spot the Ball. For the uninitiated, this involved a newspaper printing a photo of some footballers mid-action but with the ball removed. Your job as someone entering the competition was to mark with an ‘X' where you thought the ball was. This involved close examination of the expressions on players' faces and the various body shapes of all concerned. This could fill up several hours of homework-avoidance . . .

For Robert Louis Stevenson, another kind of time-wasting game, doodling an imaginary map with his stepson Lloyd, led to ‘X marks the spot' and the invention of
Treasure Island
. Together they created the names and events connected with the map, while Stevenson's father came up with the objects that might lie in a sailor's chest alongside such a map.

    
The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills, and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores. It was about nine miles long and five across, shaped, you
might say, like a fat dragon standing up, and had two fine land-locked harbours, and a hill in the centre part marked ‘The Spy-glass'. There were several additions of a later date; but, above all, three crosses of red ink – two on the north part of the island, one in the south-west, and, beside this last, in the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the captain's tottery characters, these words: ‘Bulk of treasure here.'

A version of this map can be found in most editions, some looking like a man's face with a drooping moustache, not unlike Stevenson himself.

X is also used in a very different kind of mapping. The usual line-up for chromosomes in humans is that we have twenty-two plus two ‘sex chromosomes'. Females are XX, men are XY. There was a time when I could give an account of the ways in which the different kinds of chromosome divide and combine: an extraordinary, wonderful, chemical, geometric ballet that determines our genetic structure. I could draw complex diagrams full of Xs. As it was something I learned for an exam, the details of the saga have faded, but isolated clumps remain.

When it comes to looking at characteristics that sit on the X and Y chromosomes, the scientific accounts are full of hundreds of Xs and Ys. My notebooks were full of these letters lined up against each other as a way of trying to work out who would inherit what. Remember, under usual conditions you inherit an X from your mother and either an X or a Y from your father. If you are XX, you are female. If you are XY you are male.

The graphic representation of the chromosomes as Xs and Ys, though not truthful, helps in one important respect: you can think of an X as having four arms and a Y as having three. So when you line them up next to each other, one of the X's arms
– let's say it's the bottom right arm – doesn't have an equivalent arm on the three-armed Y.

Now let's say that there's a gene that sits on the X's fourth arm. Let's also say that when this X lines up opposite another X, the characteristics that go with that particular gene (this doesn't apply to all genes) on the fourth arm won't show up in the person. It's as if the opposite point on the fourth arm ‘stops' it showing. It will do this if the gene we're talking about is ‘recessive' and its counterpart on the opposite point doing the stopping is ‘dominant'.

Now let's line up the X and the Y. As there's no fourth arm on that Y, there's nothing ‘dominant' to ‘stop' the gene of the X's fourth arm from producing the characteristics of that gene. Remember: XXs are female; XYs are male. So, what follows from this is that there are certain kinds of genes which a woman (XX) might carry but not show (‘recessive'), while the same gene carried by a male (XY) will show in him even though it is ‘recessive'. In a purely symbolic way, what I've said is true, but as the chromosomes are not strictly speaking Xs and Ys, it's not true. I like it that the false representations of chromosomes as the letters X and Y help produce a truth.

‘X' is also a letter that stands in for other words: ‘Christ' and ‘cross'. The first recorded usage of ‘Xmas' was in 1551. As I was the child of Jewish atheists, the first place I came across Christianity was at school. This was delivered through daily Christian assemblies, weekly hymn practices, weekly Religious Instruction (‘RI') or ‘Scripture', carol concerts and occasional trips to the local church.

From the age of five, we children all became experts in the pain of crucifixion. I don't think I ever got a handle on why or how the pain that Jesus underwent was for my sake – nor indeed
why his all-powerful father (who knew what I was doing at all times) couldn't have stepped in. And his pain wasn't like the pain of TV cowboys like Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger. It was prolonged, detailed, cruel and arbitrary.

This knowledge was deepened and widened by tales of other crucifixions, in particular, the slow painful death of St Andrew. In honour of his leader and messiah, Jesus Christ, Andrew said that he would not be crucified on an upright cross but on an X-shaped one. We were invited to contemplate the comparative pain of these two crucifixions which were represented symbolically on our nation's flag, the Union Jack. One consequence of this is that though I will often pass by the upright Christian cross without thinking back to those days sitting on the school hall floor, or in a row of desks in a classroom, the diagonal ‘X' cross on flags nearly always evokes a St Andrew moment.

The cross of St Andrew (the ‘saltire') has figured large in Scottish iconography for over a thousand years and has flourished since devolution. The story goes that in
AD
832 the Picts and Scots were hopelessly outnumbered by their enemies, the Angles. When their leader Óengus II prayed for victory, he was told it would be granted if St Andrew became their patron saint. On the morning of the battle, the clouds in the sky above took up an ‘X' shape, the Picts and Scots won, and St Andrew was made patron saint of Scotland. Incidentally, if you want to keep witches away – in particular to prevent them from coming down the chimney – some people recommend carving the cross of St Andrew on your fireplace surround.

You can also make this use of ‘X' with your arms and I'm fairly sure that I've seen a terrified gravedigger keep Dracula at bay (as played by Christopher Lee) with this ‘hex sign'. It worked for him. I use the same principle and same arm-crossing movement as an attempt to stop my children from jumping on me
but it doesn't seem to work. Perhaps I should revert to the finger-crossing of my childhood and shouting ‘fainites' or ‘fainies'. This could prevent you from being ‘had' and made ‘it' in a game of ‘he'. Putting your crossed fingers behind your back guaranteed that the statement you were making was not meant. ‘I didn't break your toy car, on my honour,' if said with crossed fingers behind your back, meant you were lying through your teeth.

THE STORY OF

•
AS WE MAKE THE
letter ‘Y' do several jobs, its full story is quite complicated. The ancient Greek ‘Y' shape, inherited from the Phoenicians and Semites, was ‘upsilon' and worked its way into our alphabet as our ‘U'. Around
AD
100 the Romans added ‘Y' to their alphabet from the later Greek Athenian alphabet. The Romans called their ‘Y' ‘Y Graeca', Greek Y, and it started doing the work of a short or longer ‘i' sound that we still see today in a word like ‘symphony' or ‘sympathy'. However, the Romans already had ‘I' to do this job, so it seems as if they used ‘Y' to denote that a word was of Greek origin. Old English adopted the Romans' ‘Y' replacing a rune.

In medieval writing of English, ‘i' and ‘y' seem interchangeable, with ‘y' often being preferred. Though we have retained that use at the end of words like ‘lovely' and ‘happy', we have almost entirely lost it from the middle of short words, apart from words like ‘tryst', or the self-consciously medieval computer game, ‘Myst'. These uses of ‘y' are as a vowel.

y

The modern lower-case ‘y' comes via the medieval scribes, Charlemagne's scribes and their standardized ‘Carolingian minuscule', and then passed into the print conventions of the Italian printers of the late fifteenth century.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

No one really seems to know why ‘Y' is pronounced ‘why', other than that it is very similar but not the same as ‘I'! In French it is called ‘i grec', Greek ‘i'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

As we've seen, ‘Y' does several jobs. At the beginning of words and syllables it's doing the work of providing a sound before a vowel as with ‘year', ‘you' and ‘yard'.

It can be short as in ‘sympathetic' or long as in ‘my' or ‘fly'. At the ends of adverbs (and one or two adjectives) it appears in the suffix ‘-ly' as in ‘happily' and ‘quickly'.

‘Y' can combine with vowels to make ‘day', ‘fey' and ‘boy'.

‘Y' can combine with ‘r' and ‘e' to make ‘lyre', ‘pyre' and ‘tyre'.

Readers of ancient texts find it in the word ‘y-clept' meaning ‘named' as in ‘y-clept Michael', though one or two Victorian revivalists kept it alive.

We've also developed ‘y' as a way of creating adjectives, especially if we want to make them smaller or more familiar or cutesy as in ‘cutesy'. We also have ‘hair' which becomes ‘hairy' or ‘skin' which becomes ‘skinny' without the connotations of small. But if we turn ‘pyjamas' into ‘jimmy-jams' we give it the touch of the toddler. It's why our eight-year-old has banned the term.

The ‘yo-yo' has had a long and successful life, while ‘yo', meaning ‘you', ‘yes' and ‘are you listening?' is having an even more successful one at the moment.

The ‘y' suffix can combine with almost any consonant to create sound-play:

‘happy-clappy' (a derogatory word for evangelic Christians)

‘nitty-gritty'

‘silly-billy'

‘namby-pamby'

‘Busy Lizzie'

‘Andy Pandy'

‘Yummy Mummy'

‘Nicketty-nacketty-noo-noo-noo' (from an old American folk song)

‘Dirty Gertie from number thirty'