Alphabetical (48 page)

But what about the order? Why is ‘A' the beginning and ‘Z' the end? Or, as the Christmas carol I sang at primary school goes:

    
Alpha and Omega He!

    
Let the organ thunder,

    
While the choir with peals of glee

    
Doth rend the air asunder.

Why does one letter come ‘after' another one? In truth, no one knows. No neat little story there of some ancient high priest claiming that the universe was created in alphabetical order. However, once the human race had developed this order, people started to figure out that it could be used as a means of indexing. Not that everyone has been happy about that. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge grumbled, pointing out that encyclopaedias were ordered according to ‘an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters' but the habit has been around since at least the time of the great library of Alexandria.

Step forward Zenodotus, a Greek grammarian and expert on Homer. He came from Ephesus and was the library's first librarian in the late third century
BCE
. Zenodotus didn't work to the Dewey system; he assigned different rooms to different subjects and then within each room classified the books
alphabetically according to the name of each work's author. This is a world first. What's more, the library staff attached a tag to the end of each scroll. This tag contained info on each work's author, the title and subject-matter. This enabled readers to find the scrolls they were looking for – but also, just as importantly, to browse through what was available without having to open each scroll. This too is a world first. For these two breakthroughs in the development of alphabetic ‘metadata', I have asked Zenodotus to be the sponsor of this book.

If he can't make it, then I shall approach Marcus Terentius Varro. In the first century
BCE
, he is known to have written lists of authors and titles in alphabetical order. Varro was appointed by Caesar to oversee the public library of Rome in 47
BCE
, but once Caesar had been assassinated, Varro lost his property and his job. With the takeover of Augustus, Varro was able to carry on his studies and writing, including this matter of putting things into alphabetical order. If he was the first to do this, this too was something of a conceptual breakthrough. I quite like the idea of this Varro, a public librarian, in and out of a job as caesars and generals rise and fall, adapting Zenodotus' idea that the names of books and authors could be ordered not by status, wealth, popularity or genre but by the random sequencing of their initial letters.

For all its virtues, alphabetical order has had its drawbacks. Surely it's imposed an arbitrary view of what or who is first, second and third and laid on that a notion that ‘A' being first is best, ‘B' being second is second-rate and so on. There's something warped about the ‘A-list', ‘B-movies', or ‘Z-list celebrities'. We still have ‘A-level' exams – A for Advanced, but subtly indicating they're the highest form of exam in school. When I go online for a plumber, the first one I contact comes first in the
alphabetically ordered list. Everyone wonders whether teachers favoured the children who came first in the alphabet. Were they the ones who were more likely to get to ring the bell or take a message to the caretaker? Were the ‘X', ‘Y', ‘Z' kids always last? Or, put another way, did the teacher ever read the register from ‘Z' to ‘A'? Or from the middle – first forwards and then backwards?

When people change their names, do they tend to change them to names that come earlier in the alphabet? Harry Webb changed his to Cliff Richard, Allen Stewart Konigsberg to Woody Allen, Julia Wells to Julie Andrews, Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, Maurice Micklewhite to Michael Caine, Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, while John Wayne and Stevie Wonder demoted themselves.

Though thinking of the world in alphabetical order seems very familiar to us, as recently as the early 1600s the teacher and writer Robert Cawdrey must have thought his readership needed the matter explaining to them. In the introduction to what is the first English-language monolingual dictionary,
Table Alphabeticall
, he wrote: ‘Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) looke towards the end.' Like Varro, Cawdrey was someone else who got into a bother with authority. As a Puritan, he felt entitled to decide what scriptures he would read in sermons, and even took it upon himself, unauthorized, to conduct a wedding. The Church of Queen Elizabeth didn't take this schismatic behaviour too well and, like Varro, he was out on his ear.

Fifty years ago, the alphabet ruled. So long as the topics, themes, or units consisted of letters, the prime way of ordering was ‘A–Z'. Though it still operates as the main methodology for
our indexes, its power is being undermined every day. Hyperlinks operate on the system of whole-word recognition. When we use search engines, we don't run our thumbs down any real, virtual or metaphorical alphabet. We write in ‘harmonica' and up comes a set of references to harmonicas and – importantly – this set of ‘results' isn't ordered in alphabetical order either. It arrives according to the popularity rules of Google Inc. Similarly, we might go online shopping and pull-down menus offer us retrieval options like ‘popularity' or ‘year of publication' – hardly ever the alphabet. YouTube doesn't order its tunes, lectures, artists, gags and the rest alphabetically and when you are offered alternatives, YouTube has used its own semantic system of finding similar clips. If you write a blog, you are given the chance to add ‘labels' in order to aid others to find you. These are single words or phrases which may turn up when people look for subject-matter hanging around on the internet.

Though we are in the midst of what feels like a transition or at least a co-habitation of methods, I feel like sticking my neck out and stating that the secondary use of the alphabet is about to be overthrown. When that's complete, why should the alphabetic order of letters survive? In the initial reading methods being adopted all over the English-speaking world, the order of the alphabet is of little importance; the letters are learned in groups according to the principles of phonics.

In my own life, alphabetical indexes are still massively useful and one in particular:
The A–Z Guide to London
. As I am constantly being sent to different parts of the city, I still use that old-fashioned implement, the book.

It was the brainchild of Phyllis Pearsall, who claimed that she created it by walking the 3,000 miles of the 23,000 streets
till it was done. Rain, frost, fog, snow or heatwave were no obstacle for Phyllis. ‘I had to get my information by walking,' she wrote. ‘I would go down one street, find three more and have no idea where I was.' The story goes that in 1935, tiny Phyllis, aged twenty-nine, earning a living as a portrait painter, was out visiting one of her clients, Lady Veronica Knott, at home in Maida Vale. She was travelling by bus and got off at Warwick Avenue, at the Harrow Road end, but her aristocratic host lived at the other end in Bristol Gardens. (Using your alphabetical
A–Z
or your non-alphabetic ‘Google maps', you'll be able to follow all this.) When she finally arrived at her friend's house, she was soaking wet and when the conversation got going, it turned to the fact that it was so terribly hard finding one's way round London.

Phyllis Pearsall might not have been the first to put together a London street atlas – there were several pre-dating hers – but even so, her achievement was remarkable. She certainly researched, found and mapped the latest roads and estates. She was also the first to put house numbers for streets on a map you could put in your pocket. She was the creator, developer, publisher, wholesaler, salesperson and delivery staff for a phenomenon that has resulted in one of the twentieth century's best-sellers, with at least 60 million sales. The work nearly killed her: flying back from her Dutch printers in 1946, her KLM Dakota plane crashed. However, she ended up living for another fifty years.

Since her death, we've seen the rise of Google maps, satnavs and iPhone maps. These are index-less implements. If you want to search alphabetically, they offer you that as an option, but you can search by name, postcode or by some other half-remembered landmark. The phone you're probably looking at is smaller than the
A–Z
and covers the whole world. For a moment, I feel
like a neolith. I have a
Mini A-Z
in my bag at all times. Then I remember, I haven't opened it in months. I've used print-outs of pages from Google maps – and, to help me find out how to get there, I'm not using the alphabet.

THE OULIPO OLYMPICS

One special group of alphabet heroes are the French writer, Raymond Queneau, and his friends who in 1960 set up ‘Oulipo' which stands for ‘Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle' or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature'. They wanted to find out how literature works by imposing constraints on what could or could not be written. So, a ‘pangram' is the constraint of trying to write a sentence using all the letters of the alphabet. An acrostic is the constraint of trying to write a poem by using the letters of a word as the initial letters of lines of a poem. Oulipo weren't the first to try this but they took it much further than anyone had before. Oulipo procedures produce writing from the source of language's formal structures: its phonetics, alphabet, grammar, literary conventions and the like. The end product is often both surprising and surreal.

Here is a series of twenty games which engage with how letters and the alphabet work. These can all be simplified or made harder depending on the age or experience of the players.

1.
ALPHABETICAL AFRICA

In 1974, Walter Abish (who wasn't actually a member of the Oulipo group) published a novel called
Alphabetical Africa
in which each chapter contained only words which began with a single letter of the alphabet. There were fifty-two chapters,
so in the first chapter all the words began with ‘a', the second with ‘b', the third with ‘c' until it reached ‘z'. Then, the chapters ran in reverse back through the alphabet to ‘a'.

As a challenge, try writing a story of fifty-two sentences, each of which follow the same principle and patterns of
Alphabetical Africa
: one sentence, one and the same initial letter for each word. The sentences can be as short or as long as you like. A dictionary by your side will of course be a great help.

2.
PANGRAM AND ISOPANGRAM

This rising challenge works like this:

i) Pangram

Write the shortest possible sentence using all the letters of the alphabet. You are permitted to repeat letters. Can you beat, ‘A quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'? If not, what's the shortest pangram you can write not using the main words in that sentence?

ii) Isopangram

Write a sentence that is twenty-six letters long in which you use all the letters of the alphabet. In other words, you can use a letter only once. This is probably impossible, so the challenge is to get as near to this ideal as possible.

3.
BELLE PRÉSENTE AND BELLE ABSENTE

i) Belle Présente

Write a poem or letter in which the only letters you may use are the ones in the name of the person you are writing to.

ii) Belle Absente

Write a poem or letter in which you may use any letters other than the letters of the name of the person you are writing to.

You can turn either of these into a challenge to a reader to see if he or she can find out who it is the poem or letter is addressed to.

4.
N
+ 7

Take any passage from literature, a proverb or idiom. Locate the noun or nouns in the text you have chosen. Look up the noun or nouns in a dictionary. Find the noun that is seven nouns later in the dictionary. Replace the noun or nouns in your text with the one or ones you have found in the dictionary. This produces such sentences as ‘To be or not to be, that is the quibble'.

5.
ABC WRITING

You may use only a sequence of words whose initial letters are in alphabetical order. (You can, if you want, not count ‘a', ‘an', ‘the' or prepositions like ‘to', ‘from' or ‘with' as words in the sequence.) You can try this in terms of lines of a poem, a tweet, or lines of dialogue in a sketch or play. To make it harder, one person starts and the next person has to pick up the alphabetic order of words where the first person leaves off, until you reach ‘z' and start again from ‘a'.

You might begin: ‘The Android broke the cup on David's elbow . . .'

6.
DELMAS'S METHOD

You produce a phrase or sentence in which several words begin
with the same letter. Then you re-write that phrase or sentence replacing that letter with a different single letter. For example: ‘Make the meal in a master class'. Replace the ‘m' with ‘t' and you get ‘Take the teal in a taster class'.

7.
THE EXETER TEXT

Oulipo maître Georges Perec famously wrote a novel in which the only vowel he used was ‘e'. He then wrote another in which he banned himself from using ‘e'. In ‘the Exeter text' you follow the first of these constraints, using only words with the ‘e' vowel. The test for this game will be to write the longest passage with this constraint in place in a given length of time, let's say, five minutes. You can of course then try ‘the anti-Exeter text', where the ‘e' is banned.