Alphabetical (46 page)

And so on.

Y
IS FOR YELLOW

W
HEN I WAS
learning to recite the alphabet I used to get muddled around the ‘OPQR' region but once I was over that, and could see ‘XYZ' in the distance, I was fine. ‘XYZ' was always a cinch and I would gabble the letters off in a burst for the finishing line. But then, bit by bit, the letters ‘X', ‘Y' and ‘Z' started to take on a difference from the rest of the alphabet. They got great scores at Scrabble and with ‘X' and ‘Z' being such rare and foreign ways of beginning words, homely old ‘Y' caught a bit of their exoticism.

‘Y', like ‘X' before it, is not indispensable. In many circumstances you could replace it with ‘I' as ‘I' does that kind of job, so theoretically you could write ‘iear' for ‘year'. At the end of words there are several possibilities – and indeed these have been used in the past: ‘ee' and ‘ie', so it could be ‘babee' or ‘babie'. A little more tricky to arrange would be the ‘ey' and ‘ay' diphthongs but we have the split ‘a' + ‘e' method: ‘late' and ‘state' for when there's an end consonant. Trickier would be the ‘bay'-type words. Well, let's say we could agree on ‘bai' and ‘sai' for ‘bay' and ‘say'. That leaves words like ‘rye' which we'll write like ‘lie' and, look, we've abolished ‘y'.

But we like ‘y' and we don't want to abolish it. I particularly like the diagonal slash of it in lower case and when I'm print-writing I get a tiny moment of satisfaction if I can get the two tips of the letter lined up horizontally. The upper-case version is like a funnel or a plumbing diagram.

For thousands of years, people have been hunting for Y-shaped branches to use as walking sticks. When he was fifteen, my brother found a perfect Y-branch, took the bark off it, heated a meat skewer to drill holes in it, so that he could fit a length of rubber cord, which he threaded through a piece of leather. It was a devilishly potent catapult which he would use out the back of our flat. Here there was the perfect mixture: an unlimited supply of pebbles on the dirt track and the stacks of empty drinks bottles from the off-licence a few doors down. He burned a coded signature on the shaft of the catapult – a ‘T' (square) – and spent many happy hours lining up bottles and firing pebbles at them. The ‘Y' must have done good service in the destructive games of many teenage boys in the 1950s. The fact that neither of us slashed ourselves with flying glass was probably just luck.

‘Y' has a symbolic role to play through being the initial for any organization for children or teenagers. It stands in for ‘young' or ‘youth'. In 1935, my parents met in the YCL – the Young Communist League, which we grew to understand was the place where my mother saw my father across a room playing table tennis and knew in an instant that he was the one. Or, as she put it, ‘Once I had made up my mind, he didn't have a choice in the matter.' Soon after, they went youth hostelling with the YHA, a habit they passed on to my brother and me. We wore our little green enamel triangular badges, carried our cards, and earned our stamps from the hostels we stayed at. Between us we tramped through fords, crossed moors, climbed mountains
and walked coastal paths all over England, Wales, France and Germany.

The word ‘youth' sounds odd to me now. I don't think it was a word that I ever used or heard outside of the youth hostelling. I didn't ever think of myself as a youth. Even today, it survives only in some highly specific ways, institutionally like ‘youth unemployment' or in Jamaican patois as ‘de yout dem'. Yet, that ‘Y' of YHA was definitely me and, for a youth hosteller like myself, walking from Ludlow to Aberystwyth or across Dartmoor in the dark at the age of fifteen was a big deal.

In France, it was the way I discovered the eastern end of the Pyrenees. First by meeting a French family in the Youth Hostel in Perpignan and then, while hitch-hiking across Roussillon, meeting a priest from a village in the mountains where the fields were so steep that when they cut the hay, the peasants tied themselves to a stake in the ground, hobbled by a rope. I've stayed friends with the family from the Youth Hostel all my life, sharing our moments of success and tragedy for more than fifty years. I lost contact with the priest. I wasn't entirely comfortable with the fact that he took me on a picnic up in the mountains and stripped naked to sunbathe. He asked me if I was ‘choqué' (shocked), I said that I wasn't, but I suspect I was. He said that I would be very interested in Teilhard de Chardin. I wasn't. If I hadn't been a ‘Y' with a place in the YHA I might never have encountered these people.

‘Y' also turns up in some synesthesia experiments. I had no idea what synesthesia was until someone said it's like when you say, ‘Don't look at me in that tone of voice, you taste a funny colour.' It's ‘sensory mixing', as when you might think that a colour has a taste, a touch has a smell, or a letter has a colour. ‘Y', some people say unsurprisingly, is yellow. However, for no apparent
reason, the same ‘synesthete' may well think that ‘A' is green and ‘G' is red. Jamie Ward, author of
The Frog Who Croaked Blue
, is still trying to figure out why some people are like this. No one is quite sure if the subject of language and synesthesia is significant or just interesting. It may be further evidence that Proust was right about the madeleine cakes, and that if Freud had mentioned Proust, he would have been right about Proust. Remembering the nice taste, sight and feel of a little French cake may actually be about why you love your mother, think you love your mother, hate your mother, or all three.

On the other hand, there is the question of language itself. The old rule was that language is made up of signs and these signs are ‘arbitrary'. There is nothing emergency-ish about the sound of the word ‘emergency'. We have evolved a way of writing down ‘emergency' and there isn't anything ‘emergency-ish' about that either. In English there is the word ‘book'. To a large degree, it overlaps in meaning with the French word ‘livre'. The two ‘signs' are different; the meaning a lot of the time, though, is the same. Even more ‘arbitrary': the French word ‘livre' can mean ‘pound' so for a French person there are some associations between a book and a pound. This ought to tell us that speaking and writing have evolved separately from the objects and processes that we are trying to describe.

There are obvious exceptions: pictograms have evolved from ways of trying to represent objects and processes on the page. The letters of the roman alphabet are evolved forms of pictograms, though the link is mostly broken. Is it fanciful to think that ‘I' has lasted partly because it represents the upright figure of a person? When we use ‘X' to represent the word ‘cross' this isn't ‘arbitrary'. It is in effect a pictogram. Wouldn't it be brilliant if ‘Y' stood for ‘which' instead of ‘why'? You proceed up the shaft of ‘Y' until you reach two roads. ‘Which' one
should you take? But it doesn't mean ‘which', so we'll forget that.

Onomatopoeia is non-arbitrary. ‘Crash', ‘pop', ‘slop', ‘bang', ‘quack', ‘screech' and ‘bark' are attempts at making sounds with our mouths to represent those sounds in nature. So, though there isn't anything ‘shushy' about ‘sh' – the letters are arbitrary signs – the sound of the word ‘shush' was chosen by its creators to approximate to the perception of the sound of something, i.e. not arbitrary.

But what if, on analysis, it was found that there were specific letters linked to certain clusters of meanings? What if, say, in Ruritanian language the letter ‘Y' was connected to a cluster of meanings to do with unpleasantness? So, in this language, the words for ‘evil', ‘bad', ‘unpleasant smell', ‘horrible person', ‘cheating' and ‘bullying' all began with the letter ‘Y'? This would be an exception to the arbitrariness of the sign, and would also be a form of synesthesia. The sound of the word would be linked to its meaning. As it happens, while we're on ‘Y', this letter in English has, over several centuries, delivered a good stock of words, many of them slang, to do with talking, shouting and animals making a noise: ‘yack', ‘yatter', ‘yammer', ‘yell', ‘yaffle', ‘yap', ‘yaw-haw', ‘yawl', ‘yelp', ‘yodel', ‘yoop' and ‘yowl'.

These are onomatopoeic, we might say. They are attempts to make words sound like the noise being made. One problem with this: the initial sound of ‘y' is as irrelevant to those noises as the ‘b' and the ‘k' in ‘bark'. Dogs don't say either. So, might humans have come to connect the seemingly arbitrary sign of ‘y' with talking, shouting, making a noise with our mouths? Interestingly, we have several calls along with variant words of assent which begin with ‘y' as well: ‘yes', ‘yeah', ‘yo', ‘yep', ‘yoo-hoo', ‘yo-ho', ‘yih', ‘yuh' and ‘yip', which, when we're listening to someone else speak, we might repeat: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .'

Then we have ‘you' and all its variants: ‘youse', ‘y'all', ‘ye'
and ‘yer', which we can use for calling and which often appear in rapid repetition when we're excited or angry.

So, the question here would be whether the use of the sound ‘y' and then, following that, the letter ‘y' have evolved so that they have some meaning to do with, say, the making of repeated noise. If so, it has profound significance in the evolution of language. Some sounds that our ancestors made were perhaps connected much more closely to the objects and processes of life than the phrase ‘the arbitrariness of the sign' permits.

Leaving ‘Y' for a moment, we had a contributor to Radio 4's
Word of Mouth
who came in with a statistical count of ‘sl-' words. She claimed that there were two clusters of sense around a significant number of words that begin with ‘sl': ‘slinging' and ‘slimy'. You can spend many a happy hour looking in dictionaries and thesauruses testing out the hypothesis that we have created meaning through attachments to specific sounds.

All this may mean that we are going back to prehistoric times, or it may simply mean that the law of analogy has prevailed. This law tells us that when we invent new words and expressions we do it by making them sound like words and expressions that we have used before and found likeable and useful. Let's say that the Old English verb ‘yellan' sounded so good to our ancestors' ears, and to all of us who have come since, that whenever we have thought that we needed another word to describe human or animal noise-making, we've called up ‘y' from our sound-bank to kick off a new word. So, it's not that our ancestors had a whole bunch of ‘y' words but that we've added to the stock bit by bit, finding that each one fits the bill. The end result is the same. We have a nice collection of ‘y' words to describe or talk about human and animal noise-making.

Far be it from me to big up my profession, but poets have
known about this stuff for years. It's called alliteration and part of our trade is to recruit words to sound like the feelings or processes we are describing. If I was writing a poem for children about the sea, I might decide that when the sea breaks on a beach it makes a ‘sssss' sound, just as the word itself does. I might collect together some ‘s' words that connect to the sea on a beach and use them in a song-poem: ‘see', ‘slip', ‘sand', ‘soft', ‘slide' . . . ‘See the soft sea slip, see the soft sand slide . . .' Much more subtly, poets have recruited words to indicate unspoken emotions through the repetition of word-sounds. In Thomas Hardy's regretful poem, ‘The Voice', many of the consonants, probably more than in a piece of prose about cooking, say, are continuous: ‘m', ‘s', ‘n', ‘l', ‘f', ‘v', ‘ss', ‘th' and the letter ‘w' is repeated seemingly deliberately. It begins ‘Woman much missed . . .' and has phrases like: ‘wan wistlessness' and ‘faltering forward'. Can we say that Hardy tried to express his sadness through the long, non-percussive consonants? Is it a sighing and mourning through the sound of the words?

The famous tongue-twister alliterative poetry cycle,
Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation
from 1813, has a verse for each letter of the alphabet, including the famous:

    
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled Peppers:

    
Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled Peppers?

    
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled Peppers,

    
Where's the peck of pickled Peppers Peter Piper picked?

And my favourite, ideal for double-entendre parties:

    
Neddy Noodle nipp'd his neighbour's Nutmegs;

    
Did Neddy Noodle nip his neighbour's Nutmegs?

    
If Neddy Noodle nipp'd his neighbour's Nutmegs,

    
Where are the neighbour's Nutmegs Neddy Noodle nipp'd?

Every letter in the book gets this kind of treatment, so you might have thought that though ‘X' and ‘Z' would provide a challenge too far, surely they could have come up with something for ‘Y'? Here's my suggestion two hundred years too late for inclusion: ‘Yorick York yanked a yard of Yasmin's yarn . . .'

In fact, when the authors got to the end, they threw in the towel:

    
X Y and Z have made my brains to crack-o: