Alphabetical (47 page)

    
X smokes, Y snuffs, and Z chews tobacco;

    
Yet oft by X Y Z much learning's taught,

    
But
PETER PIPER
, beats them all to naught.

‘Y' is enlisted, inseparable from its companions ‘X' and ‘Z'.

THE STORY OF

•
THE PHOENICIANS OF
3,000 years ago had a letter ‘zayin', meaning ‘axe', with the value of ‘z'. It looked like our upper-case ‘I' with the top and bottom serifs. The ancient Greeks adopted it as ‘zeta' in around 800
BCE
. It seems to have slowly evolved into our modern ‘z' shape with the sound ‘dz'. As with many of the other letters, the Etruscans took it and handed it on to the Romans but then it fell into disuse for a few centuries. In around
AD
100, the Romans started to bring in more Greek words and revived ‘zeta' to write them. Again, for several centuries it was hardly used – ‘s' doing the job of both ‘soft s' and ‘hard s' until the sound of some European languages started to make the ‘ts' sound still in use today in a word like ‘pizza'. The Norman French arrived with a few Zs in their writing and it's stayed in English ever since but mostly for loan words or coinages that want to evoke something non-British in the look or sound.

z

The lower case ‘z' comes from Carolingian minuscule.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

There seem to have been various names for ‘z' in and around Shakespeare's time: ‘zed', ‘izzard', ‘ezod' and ‘zee' are amongst them. Was ‘izzard' originally ‘ezz 'ard'? Or did it come from French ‘et zède'? However it was, we have ‘zed' in British English. In America, there used to be both, but it was regularized as ‘zee' by Noah Webster as you can see in ‘
W is for Webster
'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

At the beginning of words, it is the hard ‘s' sound of ‘zebra' and ‘zany'. It doubles in ‘puzzle', ‘drizzle', ‘dazzle' and ‘jazz' with the same value. It doesn't usually end words with a single ‘z' apart from ‘quiz', Dickens' pen-name ‘Boz' and abbreviations like ‘showbiz' and Shakespearean ‘coz' (reduced from ‘cousin').

In imports from Italy it imitates the Italian ‘ts' sound as in ‘piazza' and ‘pizzicato'.

‘Z' can combine with consonants to make words like ‘frenzy', ‘adze' (a now-extinct carpentry tool) and ‘czar', and combines with ‘r' to make ‘furze', ‘Wurzel' (a dialect word for a turnip as well as a character from a children's book).

Some modern popular and slang words have increased the number of Zs in speech and writing: ‘zip' (meaning both a ‘fastener' and ‘nothing'), ‘zilch', ‘zen', ‘zero' (as the verb ‘to zero in on' and as a metaphor for ‘worthless'), ‘zing', ‘whizz', ‘tizz', ‘zizz', ‘zhuzh up', ‘zit', ‘zoom', ‘fizz', ‘fizzy', ‘zed-list', ‘zap', ‘pizzazz', ‘woozy', ‘bozo', ‘dozy', the comic book ‘zzzzz' (also known as ‘pushing out the zeds'), the names ‘Zach', ‘Liz' and ‘Lizzie', and a vogue for creating nicknames, like ‘Bazza' from ‘Barry', ‘Dazza' from ‘Darren' and ‘Tezza' from ‘Terry'. The old word ‘geezer' lives on too.

The arrival of more Asian names in Britain has provided the language with some Asian ‘z' names and nicknames like ‘Naz', ‘Zeynab', ‘Zain' and ‘Reza', adding to the Russian or Polish ‘Zosha' and ‘Zara'. The Old Testament used to provide people with a few Zs in names like ‘Zephaniah', now revived with the poet Benjamin Zephaniah. The obligatory US way of writing the suffix
‘-ize' is probably upping the rate of Zs in Britain, producing ‘liquidize' and ‘psychoanalyze' because we can turn any word into a verb that way. Even as I am writing this, I realize that I should ‘monetize the economy', ‘deodorize the kitchen' and ‘valorize the product'. I just hope that this book has been ‘editorized'.

Z
IS FOR ZIPCODES

P
ERHAPS THE MOST
universally utilitarian way of using the alphabet has been the invention of postcodes. Our addresses are full of local history: the names of streets and areas are markers of their past. Aldwych means ‘old town' in Anglo-Saxon and the street describes a curve around the edge of deserted Roman Londinium; Soho was a hunting cry and the area got its name from when it was a royal park. But many of the same names echo across the map: there are hundreds of Church Roads and High Streets, all describing a particular church or former village. The address scrawled on an envelope coming through your door focuses in on your destination, line by line, like the viewfinder on a camera. But all this history can complicate finding a specific destination.

On 1 July 1963, the word ‘zip', which up until then had meant (a) to move along fast, (b) a state of high energy, (c) nothing at all or (d) a mechanical clothes fastener, came to mean in the US (e) the postcode. The term wasn't coined in order to show that postage would now cost zip, nor did it have anything to do with ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah', the song from the 1946 Disney movie
Song of the South
. ‘Zip' is an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan and it was chosen in order to suggest that the mail would travel more efficiently, and therefore more quickly, when senders used it.

The basic code at this stage was a two-letter abbreviation of the US state followed by a five-digit number. The person who gets the main credit for inventing this was Robert Aurand Moon from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, who developed the idea in the 1940s while working as a postal inspector in Philadelphia. Moon is the father of the ZIP. When the ZIP came in, in order to coax Americans into using their ZIP codes the postal service used a cartoon character called Mr ZIP. Robert Moon was not Mr ZIP, and neither Mr ZIP nor Robert Aurand Moon invented the zip fastener. However, Robert Aurand Moon earned zip from his invention. Some people earned zip from inventing the zip fastener too.

Original thinker though Mr Moon was, the zipcode was an appropriation of a system that had been invented in Britain almost a century earlier. In 1835, the postal service was patchy, private and under constant surveillance by the censors and political snoopers. When reformer Rowland Hill noticed a young woman unable to afford to redeem the postage (which had to be paid by the receiver, not the sender) on a letter from her fiancé, it apparently inspired him to turn his energies from education and Australia to the post service.

There were no agreed postage rates and all kinds of fiddles and rackets were rife. Hill's first radical suggestion was that all letters should be pre-paid with a universal stamp. Despite a lot of resistance from the House of Lords, the middle classes saw the sense (and profit) in his system and it was approved. The first stamp – the penny black, an elegant rectangle engraved with the outline of young Queen Victoria – appeared in 1840
and was a huge success. It was such a success that Hill came to realize that addresses had to be rationalized and simplified. The person sorting through tonnes of envelopes at top speed didn't have time to read the full address. There were too many words, so what was needed was a straightforward code, like a map reference, that could show the sorting office instantly where the letter should be going.

In 1856 Hill drew a circular area with a radius of 12 miles around London. Using the points on the compass, he divided London up into N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W and NW. He then divided the central zone into EC and WC. This way of putting addresses on envelopes became fully operational by 1858. A few years later, first NE got the chop with its boroughs being merged into E; then S got split and its parts sent off into SE and SW.

In 1917, the alphabet was called into use again in what must be one of its most puzzling acts of public service. Each district was subdivided into sub-districts. The area served by the head office in each district was given the number 1. Following that, the sub-districts were shuffled into the alphabetical order of their name and numbered accordingly. So, as an example:

For anyone outside of the postal service, this is a fine example of alphabetical order winning out over sense. If you don't know the borders of a given district; or the names of the sub-districts (they don't correspond to all the parish names); or that two of the districts have two head districts so the numbering of sub-districts in these two districts starts at 3; or that several districts have added on sub-districts; and if you don't have an up-to-date map in front of you marked with the postal districts, then the code is of little use to you. The result of this is that people who have lived in London all their lives spend many hours in conversation with loved ones and strangers, looking up from reading an address on a bit of paper in front of them saying things like, ‘Where's SW5?' Then everyone in the room has a guess, with most of the guesses not even including places in SW London. Sometimes the alphabet is a false god.

Tip: if someone says to you ‘Where's E19?' it's a trick question. There's an E18 and an E20 but no London E19. E20 is the postal district of the BBC Television's
EastEnders
' location, Walford. This is now officially located in a new and real E20: the ‘Olympic Park' sub-district. Olympic Park comes after E18 which is Woodford and South Woodford. ‘O' comes before ‘W' in the alphabet: the postal district rule has been broken.

If you live in, work in or travel through a city and you want to avoid the feeling of being governed by alphabetical zips, postcodes and co-ordinates, you can opt for the ‘dérive'. This was devised by Guy Debord and his radical ‘Situationist' friends in Paris in the 1960s. It's been taken up as ‘psychogeography' by the writers Will Self and Iain Sinclair amongst others. Without getting too overblown about this, it's a way of travelling – usually walking – through the landscapes and cityscapes governed by the guidelines you choose or make.

Not long ago, I came across the fact that during the English Civil War, Londoners who were in support of Parliamentarians threw up a line of defences in a semicircle around London. Clearly, there were sufficient numbers of people who thought that this would help in the event of London being assaulted by Royalist forces. If you so chose, you could decide that this would be your dérive and armed with your plan you could re-create with your feet and mind the map of the Parliamentarians' defences. I've done parts of this semicircular journey and, if nothing else, the result is that a place or site becomes peopled in a new way. The rather dull reservoir banks on the Pentonville Road in Islington, or the graveyard at Shoreditch Church, each surrounded by the roar of traffic, become defence posts where Cromwell or Fairfax clicked their heels.

Alternatively, defiance of zips and postcodes can be more personal and you can – as I have done – pick routes that parents, grandparents or much earlier ancestors have taken across town. Postcodes look like frontiers on maps, while the frontiers in people's lives are usually unmarked. My father talked of crossing a frontier to see my mother when they ‘started seeing each other', moving out of the ‘safe' area he lived in to the apparently unsafe one where she lived. In my mind's eye this involved an epic trudge with boundaries that were visible in some way.

When I walked it some sixty years after my father had trod that way, it turned out to be not much more than a stroll and of course there were no physical, cultural or mental markers left. I just quietly labelled the cityscape with what I had been told, a personal postcode, if you like.

So here we are at the end of the alphabet. The word ‘alphabet' contains something of the same idiom as ‘It's as easy as A, B, C,' as it is constructed out of the first two words of the Greek
alphabet, ‘alpha' and ‘beta'. The alphabet is then the ‘alphabeta', rather as if we were to call the number system the ‘one-two'. Tracing the route back we go to Latin ‘alphabetum', back to ancient Greek ‘alphabetos', back to Phoenician ‘aleph' (‘ox') and ‘beth' (‘house') which were once pictograms. So, incredibly, the word ‘alphabet' contains within it the whole history of this particular alphabet or ‘ox-house' as we could call it.