One-Letter Words, a Dictionary (2 page)
Read One-Letter Words, a Dictionary Online
Authors: Craig Conley
Tags: #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Reference, #General
THE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET AS OUR ROAD MAP TO THE MINDSCAPE
T
he Croatian-American writer Josip Novakovich made a fascinating observation about learning a second language. Cut off from the umbilical of his mother tongue, he found the freedom to experiment. As he puzzled out how to spell a new word, or rearranged phrases and sentences, pictures began forming in his mind, and those pictures opened doors into “imagined countries, histories, songs, and silences.” He likened it to playing with those colorful letter building blocks from childhood, and he took great pleasure in constructing the contours of his own imaginary spaces. “[W]riting in English became a way to carve out a place for myself,” he said. “It was what allowed me to negotiate a space in which I had control over events and landscapes, to shape the world according to private experience” (
Stories in the Stepmother Tongue
).
What an intriguing concept—individual letters of the alphabet shaping the topography of a mental landscape that had been there all along, marking out the spots of buried treasures you didn’t know you had.
Author Dana Redfield had an experience similar to Novakovich’s when she began looking at her native English alphabet from a different perspective. Her study of the geometry of the letterforms “spilled so much light into my mind, it seemed to brighten out a mystical landscape beyond the borders of my normal consciousness” (
The ET-Human Link
). It was as if the closer she looked at the alphabet letters, the more she could detect the architectural forms of a previously hidden world. Of course, scholars of the sacred Hebrew and Sanskrit letterforms (to name but two ancient scripts) have for centuries been making similar claims that an alphabet can illuminate other worlds.
What fun it is to allow letters to reveal landscapes of the mind, and to trace out the shapes of letters in the natural world. Albert Einstein once said of Isaac Newton, “Nature was to him an open book, whose letters he could read without effort.” This flies in the face of Sigmund Freud, however, who wrote in
The Interpretation of Dreams
that letters of the alphabet have no right in a landscape, “since such objects do not occur in nature.” Could Freud have been wrong? After all, painters often seem to read the letters in nature, evident in how they work alphabet shapes into their compositions to lead the viewer’s eye toward a focal point. “For instance,” says art expert Mary Whyte, “the letters C, L, Z, J, V, or S can be seen underlying many compositions,” whether consciously depicted or not (
Watercolor for the Serious Beginner
). And nature photographer Kjell B. Sandved found the entire alphabet depicted on the wings of moths and butterflies—even if it did take him more than twenty-five years and visits to more than thirty countries to discover every letter. He concluded that “Nature’s message is clear for all to see…it is written on the wings of butterflies!” (
The Butterfly Alphabet
).
Individual letters are the smallest elements of words, and words are the smallest elements of thought. It’s no wonder, then, that when people try to imagine what the creative process might
look
like, they often picture
letters of the alphabet
swirling around in someone’s head.
At Walt Disney World’s Epcot theme park, the original Journey into Imagination pavilion took guests into a three-dimensional mock-up of the brain’s storehouse of information. At one point during the ride, visitors saw a character named Dreamfinder seated at the console of a giant typewriter, the top of which was a trembling volcano. As Dreamfinder touched the keys, letters exploded out of the volcano and drifted down as words, falling onto the pages of a book.
Such a mental landscape—or “mindscape”—sought to turn an abstract concept (“thought,” “imagination,” “creativity”) into a concrete one. A mindscape offers us a common point of reference when we venture into the mysterious world of the mind. Authors present mindscapes to their readers all the time. They do it so that we can understand what makes a character tick.
In the following passage from the novel
The Arabian Nightmare,
author Robert Irwin imagines what it’s like in the deepest part of the mind, the part that we have inherited from‚ our most distant ancestors and that links us to them.
[One] became aware, albeit always dimly, of something small at the centre of the brain beyond reach of thought or memory, quite beyond conscious seizing—the primal matter of consciousness perhaps. One glimpsed from a great distance an area, brilliantly lit by internal flashes of lightning, in which tiny little men flickered and ran carrying letters, emblems and numbers amid blocks of flashing rods and colours. It was beyond meaning.
This deepest part of the mind exists far beneath the thinking part of our brain, beyond words and concepts. It is aptly described as a turbulent world of flashing lights and colors, where little people run around transporting individual letters, numbers, and other symbols—the building blocks of consciousness. The following quotation from Milorad Pavic’s novel
Dictionary of the Khazars
has some marked similarities to the previous passage:
The Khazars saw letters in people’s dreams, and in them they looked for primordial man, for Adam Cadmon…. They believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that each of these letters constitutes part of Adam Cadmon’s body on earth, and that these letters converge in people’s dreams and come to life in Adam’s body.
Here, too, the author believes part of our brain links us to our ancient ancestors. In this case, it goes all the way back to Adam, the archetype of the first human. Letters of the alphabet appear in this passage, also. They are the stuff that dreams are made of. They also symbolize the very building blocks of our existence.
Science fiction authors like Pat Cadigan (
Mindplayers
) and Greg Bear foresee the day when scientists will be able to enter into a person’s mindscape via high-tech tools. In Bear’s novel
Queen of Angels,
psychologists step into the mind of a murderer and find a mental city on whose sidewalks misshapen letters are scribbled and on whose walls posters of “everchanging, meaningless letters” are plastered.
Until the future that Bear describes arrives, we must be content to
imagine
the hills and valleys that make up the landscape of the mind. But we aren’t without a guide. The letters of the alphabet are our passport and our road map. The authors quoted above seem to suggest that the alphabet spells out the answers to all of life’s questions. We must simply find the right combinations.
A IN PRINT AND PROVERB
1. (phrase)
A per se
means “
a
by itself makes the word
a.
”
2. (phrase)
Not to know A from B
means to be ignorant.
“How are your brains?”
“I know A from B and two plus two,” I answered him. “That’ll do. The rest you can learn.”
—Karen Cushman,
Matilda Bone
3. (phrase)
Not to know A from a windmill,
a popular expression until the nineteenth century, means to be ignorant.
[Mid-fifteenth-century poet Frian Daw Topias’s] characterization of himself as…not knowing an “a” from a windmill or a “b” from a bull’s foot seems to go beyond the conventional modesty topos of other writers.
—James Dean,
Six Ecclesiastical Satires
4. (in literature)
A, black hairy corset of dazzling flies/Who boom around cruel stenches,/Gulfs of darkness
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Vowels”
5. (in literature)
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter
concerns a woman condemned to wear an
A
(for the crime of adultery) embroidered on her breast.
Any woman wearing such a letter was shunned by society. Here’s what Hawthorne writes in the first chapter: “On the breast of her gown, in red cloth, surrounded with elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter
A.
” The description makes it seem beautiful—doesn’t that make the symbolic meaning all the more serious and chilling?
After all, A is really harmless enough, even if A is the scarlet letter.
—William H. Gass,
The Tunnel
6. (in literature)
“Do you know what A means, little Piglet?…It means Learning, it means Education, it means all the things that you and Pooh haven’t got.”
—A. A. Milne,
The World of Pooh
7. (in literature)
“A is the roof, the gable with its crossbeam, the arch; or it is two friends greeting, who embrace and shake hands.”
—Victor Hugo, quoted in
ABZ
by Mel Gooding
8. (in film)
The title of a ten-minute short film from Germany,
written and directed by Jan Lenica in 1965. The synopsis states: “A writer is persecuted by an enormous and abusive letter ‘A.’ Just as he thinks he has gotten rid of it, a giant ‘B’ appears.”
9.
n.
A written representation of the letter.
[3-D graphic designer Peter Cho] points to a dancing A and challenges me to define the properties of this or any other letter. Cutting-edge technology allows us to give letters virtually any form, he says, but the brain somehow provides the mental ability to recognise a specific letter.
—Leo Gullbring, “The Rebirth of Space” in
Frame Magazine
10.
n.
A device, such as a printer’s type, for reproducing the letter.
POINTS IN TIME AND SPACE
11.
n.
The beginning,
as in “from A to Z.”
Intuition is the journey from A to Z without stopping at any other letter along the way.
—Gavin De Becker,
The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence
12.
n.
The first letter of the alphabet.
Her embarcation card, filed under A, had eluded the search made by the harbour police.
—Georges Perec,
Life: A User’s Manual
A is the inside, as it were, the origin and source from which the other letters flow, and likewise the
final goal to which all the others flow back, as rivers flow into the ocean or into the great sea.
—Hermes, “Tractatus aureus” (Golden Treatise of Hermes)
13.
prep.
In each.
[E]ach dialysis session bothered him less, and by now he was used to being hooked to the machine three times a week.
—Sanjay Nigam,
Transplanted
Man: A Novel
14.
prep.
(informal)
Of.
Have you the time
a
day?
15.
n.
A precursor.
[A] feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naïve faith in causality—the notion that A in the past
caused
B in the present, which will
cause
C in the future.
—Tom Wolfe,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
16.
n.
A high-level perception of cosmic unity, beyond causality.
[A]ctually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it…in this moment…this supreme moment…this
kairos.—Tom Wolfe,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
17.
n.
Waking consciousness.
Allegorically, the initial A of [the sacred Hindu syllable] AUM is said to represent the field and state of
Waking Consciousness, where objects are of “gross
matter”…and are separate both from each other and from the consciousness beholding them.
—Joseph Campbell,
The Mythic Image
MUSIC
18.
n.
The sixth note in a C-major musical scale.
Suppose you played the note A on a piano, and then went up eight white keys to another A. A musician would say the second A is one “octave” higher than the first A.
—David M. Schwartz,
Q Is for Quark: A
Science Alphabet Book
19.
n.
A written or printed representation of a musical note A.
20.
n.
A string, key, or pipe tuned to the note A.
21.
n.
The first section in a piece of music.
The final passacaglia’s five bar theme is clearly derived from section A of the Chorale and its surprising five bar phrasing.
—OrganConcert. info
DESIGNATIONS
22.
n.
A standard,
as in “A one.”
Her gears being in/A 1 shape.
—e. e. Cummings, “she being Brand”
23.
n.
A grade in school meaning superior.
The second skit [starring comedian Paul Lynde as an aging criminal who is heartbroken to learn his son is growing into a law-abiding honor student] included the funniest use of a single letter in film history: Lynde clutches his son’s report card and, horrified at the academic excellence which will
ultimately deny him an heir in his crime business, runs off-screen screaming aloud the boy’s straight
A grades, stretching the letter “A” into a piercing wail of Greek tragedy proportions.
—Phil Hall, in a
Film Threat
review of the 1954 musical comedy
New
Faces
24.
n.
One graded with an A.
My husband gives me an A/for last night’s supper, /an incomplete for my ironing.
—Linda Pastan, “Marks”
25.
n.
Something arbitrarily designated A
(e.g., a person, place, or other thing).
Historical attention is like needle and thread going in and out of the holes of a button, fastening A to B only by passing through both many times.
—William H. Gass,
The Tunnel
26.
article.
A particular one.
men all of
a
sort
27.
prep.
Per.
Eggs are 60¢
a
dozen.
28.
prep.
Any single.
Not
a
one made it through alive.
29.
prep.
Any certain one.
A
Mr. Po called.
30.
prep.
Another.
a
Mona Lisa in beauty
SHAPES AND SIZES
31.
n.
Something having the shape of an A.
32.
n.
A-frame:
a triangular supporting frame; a triangular, all-roof building.
A-frame enthusiasts in the 1950s and 1960s were correct in asserting that the form had an ancient lineage.
The simplicity, strength, and versatility of…triangu
lar structures explain why they were so common for so many centuries.
—Chad Randl,
A-Frame
33.
n.
A shoe width size
(wider than AA, narrower than B).
34.
n.
A brassiere cup size.
Bust circumference is determined by measuring the circumference of the chest loosely with a tape around the fullest part of the breasts, usually at the level of the nipples, with the woman ordinarily wearing a bra. Cup size is then determined by comparing the bust circumference to the underbust plus five measurement. A difference of 1 inch equals an A cup, 2 inches a B cup, 3 inches a C cup, and so on. For example, a woman with a bust circumference of 36 inches and a band size of 34 (underbust chest circumference or 29
+
5 inches) would be a B cup (36
-
34
=
2 inch difference
=
B cup).
—Edward A. Pechter, M.D.,
Breast Measurement
35.
n.
A-shirt:
a T-shirt without sleeves.
MISCELLANEOUS
36.
n.
The lightest weight of sandpaper available.
The letter A signifies the lightest weight of paper used.
—Bruce E. Johnson,
The Wood Finisher
37.
n.
Any spoken sound represented by the letter.
The sound vibration of the vowel A means “washing, purity, purification, purifying light.”
—Joseph E. Rael,
Tracks of Dancing Light: A Native American
Approach to Understanding Your Name
38.
v.
(chiefly informal)
Have.
He’d
a
done it if he wanted to.
39.
v.
(slang)
Going to.
I’m a do it like this.
—The Rap Dictionary
SCIENTIFIC MATTERS
40.
n.
A vitamin (retinol/carotene).
Vitamin A is particularly associated with eye health, because it protects the surface of the cornea. It is also essential for the development of bones, growth, and reproduction. It helps the body resist infection by protecting the linings of the respiratory, digestive, and urinary tracts and maintains healthy skin and hair. Beta carotene (also known as pro vitamin A) is converted to vitamin A by the body. Unlike retinol, beta carotene is an antioxidant—a substance that protects the body against disease and premature aging by fighting the cell-damaging chemicals called free radicals…. Good sources of vitamin A are liver and fish-liver oils, egg yolk, milk and dairy products, and margarine.
Beta carotene is found in dark-green and deep-yellow fruits and vegetables, such as carrots, apricots, and spinach.
—American Medical Association