Buggeryville

(Written for my recent reading. Not read exactly as written.)

I'm going to be using a lot of letters of the alphabet tonight, so I thought we should get familiar with them before we go any further. So here are a few:

A, B, C, D, E, F, J, K, L, N, V.

It's not a complete list.

It's missing the letter Z ("zee" or "zed"), which comes from the Greek letter ζ ("zeta" or "zdeta").

It's missing a few other letters as well.

It's missing the letter æ ("ash") and the letter œ ("ethel").

OK, maybe you're thinking: Those aren't letters, they're digraphs, they're ligatures.

You could argue that. But æ entered the English alphabet as a replacement for the runic letter æsc ("ash"):


...which was a single letter. So at least then, it was thought of as a single letter in the English alphabet.

S is a letter, but it's not clear that an S with a vertical line or two running through it ($) is also a letter.

But although & ("ampersand") was an abbreviation for the Latin "et" or the French "et", it was often treated like a letter early in the age of printed texts, coming after Z in alphabets made for children and printers.

So there is room for debate.