THE SIMPLE LIFE

You realise it can’t have been that long ago that there were just the twenty-six letters with no order whatsoever. People were filing the A stuff next to the Q stuff and some of the X stuff was at the front while other bits were after the Js. I guess one day the supervisor came in and started having a go at the staff because the files were all over the place and he couldn't find anything. Or he was trying to find someone's address and couldn't remember the name of the book with all the streets in it. Suddenly, there's a project team set up trying to come up with an order for all this stuff.

Because, when you actually think about it, alphabetical order is pretty random. The vowels are all over the place, most of the unpopular letters are at the back but the Q's marking the two-thirds point there beside the far more popular choices of P and R, and that U, V, W thing is just plain sloppy. If you take a good, hard look at the alphabet you get the impression it was put together by two guys by candlelight with twenty-six scraps of paper and a crate of cider.

Once those two guys had settled on alphabetical order they then had to sell it to the rest of the world. Surely, this was the best marketing campaign in history. Who hasn’t heard of the alphabet? Who doesn't know what order it comes in? And in these days where we're being sold internet holidays and ebanking with terms like myholiday and mymoney - the alphabet guys make that look old fashioned. I mean, you don't ask whether a child knows the alphabet - you ask if little Jenna knows her alphabet. "Yes, I know my alphabet," she replies proudly, before reciting it in that order we've all come to embrace.

And while language is endlessly evolving, the alphabet has stayed in that same rigid order. Nobody has remodelled, revamped or relaunched the alphabet. It's like they got it right straight out of the gate.

Do you think they tried out a few different alphabetical orders on the public first? Was there, like, the YBC and the ABP to begin with? You know there'd be market traders stubbornly clinging to the old alphabetical for a while. "Yeah, this here is your TGF dictionary - this is the old imperial alphabet, from before we went ABCric to conform with Europe last year. Man, that ABC stuff is just... I dunno, I can’t get to grips with it, y'know? An' all the words have gone up, you notice that?"