The Alphabet Abecedarium: Some Notes on Letters
Richard A. Firmage
Bloomsbury, £14.99, 307pp
Buy it at BOL
Your favourite letter is always the first letter of your first name. It's your mark - your initial - and, like a comfort blanket or a favourite toy, your first object of affection. You feel proprietary towards it. You want to protect it. Some people like to wear theirs on a signet ring or a necklace, like an amulet or a memento mori. As time goes on you learn to share, of course, and other letters are added, until finally you enter into a full relationship with the whole alphabet. Churchill, who had to work to cure his lisp, wrote, "I can't be haunted by the idea that I must avoid every word beginning with an S." Quite. Sorry. Smoke. Snacks. Smut.
But as you come to master and possess the alphabet, so it comes to possess you. From childish self-obsession you pass on to adolescent pencil-case doodlings and signature fumblings, before you find yourself hooked and hitched. Inevitably, the fires of passion die down, and it seems impossible to recover that early sense of adventure and romance and fun. You become complacent. Perhaps this is why people become linguists, or poets: to preserve that raw excitement and the thrill of the chase.
In order to rekindle any relationship you need to rediscover your loved one's uniqueness; you need to be reintroduced, and seduced. To reacquaint yourself with the thrills of the big 26 you could try this: go to your local DIY store and get them to unlock the cabinet containing the spray paints. Choose a colour: the bolder the better. Find a wall. Wait until no one else is around. And then write your name in big fat bubbly letters six feet high.
Alternatively, you could read Richard Firmage's The Alphabet Abecedarium, a bursting sentimental history of letters, which sets out to conjure up the beauty and strangeness of that all too familiar ABC. Firmage's is that rare thing, an intelligent book with décolletage.
Firmage has 28 rather than the expected 26 chapters; the first 26 are A-Z, 27 is "A-Z" and 28 is "&". The subject of at least one of these chapters is guaranteed to be of interest to you. Writing about my own personal favourite, Firmage speculates that "it represents the oneness of God and also symbolises power descending to man from on high and man's yearning towards higher things. Perhaps the straight form of the letter influenced Socrates to speculate in Cratylus that iota was expressive of penetration - 'the subtle elements which pass through all things'." I always thought as much.
Of course, the study of words makes you horribly self-conscious, and can send you mad in the end. Alexander Cruden went mad. WC Minor, one of the more prolific contributors to Murray's original OED (and the subject of Simon Winchester's recent bestselling The Surgeon of Crowthorne), was patient number 742 in Broadmoor. And the study of letters is more mind-boggling still.
Firmage, for example, has a tendency to both swank and ponder, and he relies for evidence and anecdote on eccentrics such as Renaissance designer Geoffrey Tory and a mysterious someone called Zolar's rather windy and rose-pink Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge (1970). Firmage forces gorgeous fact upon gorgeous fact: the outcome is more like exotic book-patterned wall-paper than a book. You can't actually read it: you just ogle.
But The Alphabet Abecedarium does have its desired effect: it reminds you of your first love. It makes you want to go and play hangman, or Scrabble, or "I Love My Love", a game mentioned in Pepys and Dickens but immortalised by Max Bygraves, in which you have to work through the alphabet describing your sweetheart (or, in a chaste Victorian variation, the parson's cat). Suffice it to say, then, that The Alphabet Abecedarium is agreeable, becoming, careful, desirable, egregious, fidgety, garrulous, humorous, industrious, judicious, keen, lively, merry, natty, obsequious, poppy, querulous, regular, sociable, tasteful, useful, vivacious, worthy, xanthippic, yearning, zealous and &.
.png?w=600)
