QWERTY

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

It’s pronounced zed. To pronounce it zee just confuses things when you’re trying to spell words aloud over the radio or the phone. Having said that, when spelling a word out to someone over the radio or phone, I still pronounce zebra as zeebra, just like I pronounce bury as berry. It doesn’t make sense, but English is like that.

After I typed out the alphabet above in an effort to jump-start my daily writing,(which seems to be working so far) I read an article on the NATO phonetic alphabet. I’ll post it below. If you want to read it, it’s quite interesting.

Have you ever considered how language sounds to others? I only understand English, I did learn a bit of Spanish last year, but not enough to make friends. While I was trying to understand what everyone around me was saying, I was struck by the realization that it was all just gibberish in my ears and brain. I felt like a dog who’s owner talks to it as if it understands complete sentences, then I’d see a dog, and think that even it understood more Spanish than I did. I consoled myself with the fact that I could read, and dogs couldn’t. I also have thumbs, and can talk.

Whenever I was cabbing or bussing around Panama, I would read all the signs as the words were spelled out in that familiar alphabet, and I would speak the words to myself, and begin to understand, after a fashion. It was funny when I came back home to Canada because I would then read French labelling as if it were Spanish because it’s all so similar, and yet still largely incomprehensible, especially when I read French aloud like Cheech.

I read a few pages of a book aloud to Hez the other night. The pages were from a guidebook for oracle cards. There were no characterizations, nor expletives, or anything like that, so instead of my usual rush to get the job done, or add drama and accents, I slowed down, read at a measured pace, and concentrated on reading smoothly. I had to read it again afterwards, because I found myself focusing on the shapes of the words and the individual letters, and I nearly lost my ability to read as a result of just seeing the alphabet all jumbled up on the pages. You know when you say a word too many times, and it starts to sound stupid, and maybe you also forget what it means? Yeah, me neither....anyway, it was like I imagine that being like.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

It’s not much, and outside of early grade school, we never see the letters arranged in that way. We see them arranged like this, or maybe like that, or as on a QWERTY keyboard, or barbacoa, or chapeau, or holy shitballs. It’s wild.

I find language fascinating. There are several hundred thousand words in the English language, possibly up to a million if you include absolutely everything, like point, pointy, pointed, pointedly, points, pointer, pointers, you get the point. Point. Point. There are over 90 definitions in the dictionary for the word point alone.

You need to be able to use about 10,000 words to be considered fluent in any language, and the average vocabulary of an adult born-in-Canada English speaker is about 20,000 words. Functionally, there are about 170,000 words in common use in the English language unabridged dictionary, with an additional 47,000 words that are considered obsolete. Even at the base level of fluency, that’s 10,000 combinations of only 26 letters, and some of the letters don’t even get used very often, like j,q,x, and z. That’s just the letter combos, then you get into combining words to make sentences, and you have this amazing ability to say whatever you want. I find that exhilarating.

Languages are always getting shorter. Their evolution almost looks like devolution as words become truncated, or blended, or tossed to the midden and forgotten. It’s a shame in some ways, and the older one gets, the more likely it is that they’ll lament the loss of quality in diction and the written word, as all things surrender to erosion and entropy, and possibly become more streamlined and newfangled. Then the aforementioned codgers will complain, as only codgers can, about how nobody writes like they did back when REAL literature like Tom Sawyer was created.

I wouldn’t know. I’ve never read any of “the classics”. I own some of them because I felt like, as a collector of books, I should, but I’ve never been able to force myself to read any of them. There’s just so many books out there that excite me more, so I read those. I did give Old Man and the Sea a try once, because it was so short that I thought I could get through it, but no. I could not care about anything in those pages.

I’m not trying to be obtuse, or glory in my ignorance; I’m just enjoying my evolution, revelling in it, in fact. I don’t have to please everybody, I can read whatever I like, I can write how I like. I can ignore paragraph and sentence structure if it suits me, and if I can make it work for the style.

If I can make it work for my style.

I love doing this, I love being me.

It’s really hard to do it right, but I’m learning.