Despite long being a staple of Western languages, little is known about the modern alphabet. A recent poll conducted by Sesame Street indicated that 7 out of every 8 Americans do not know from where our alphabet came, who was responsible for its creation, or even why it is the way it is. And yet it is so integral to our daily life that it is widely acknowledged as one of the few things all our sober adults can be fairly expected to recite, backward and forward, rhyming and not rhyming. So why is it that Americans have cast aside the history of this mighty tool? The answer is unknowable, but the history itself is not, and it is the purpose of this tome to rectify this grievous situation.

The English alphabet is similar to many Western alphabets as they all arose from the same grubby, linguistic cellar. For the purposes of this history, let us stick to the English variation. Not only is standard English the first language of 90% of this volume's contributors but it is also free of umlauts, tildes, or accents, which only serve to confuse an already tricky survey. True, our language has ballooned to 3 times the size of other western languages, but the alphabet has weighed in at a trim 26 letters for the last 100 years.

In this foreword, I will examine briefly one of the most fundamental, but somehow most ignored, questions surrounding the alphabet: the ordering of the letters. In most of our day-to-day lives we accept alphabetical order as a clear-cut, unquestioned system of cataloging. But it wasn't always that way. Chronological and numerical order have clear corollaries in the physical world that make their ordering inevitable. But unlike 0 or 1, there is nothing about A that is inherently "first". Indeed, in this historian's humble opinion, M seems the letter most qualified to fire the opening salvo of any alphabet this side of Asia.

Indeed, there are simpler ways to arrange letters than the present, inscrutable system in use in the English alphabet. Imagine, if you can, 26 letters, laid out before you in no particular order. Your task is to arrange them into an alphabet in a logical way. There is no reason to string them together in the fashion to which we are most accustomed. Logic would suggest, perhaps, grouping the letters by shape, lumping closed letters like O and D and B and open letters like C and T and J. Or it may make the most sense to arrange your 26 glyphs phonetically, putting the vowels at the front of the alphabet and then building to the hardest consonants, ending with P, G, and K.

But, as we know, neither of these straightforward systems was adopted. Instead, new research posits, the alphabet was subject to the same chaotic forces that drove much of human progress: greed of power and lust of legacy. New DNA testing shows that around 1700 BCE an English monk named Gregor Bolt invented and propagated the letter B, to make possible the spelling of his last name. Bolt belonged to a very hierarchical monastery, the first, and last, chapter of the Order of the Goat. Bolt's order was exceedingly hierarchical and extremely devout, predating Christianity itself by some 2000 years.

The creation of the new letter called attention to the collection of symbols that the Monks kept, in no particular order, in an old wine cellar. These letters, it seems, were on their way to becoming the building blocks of the modern alphabet but they were kept scattered among cobwebs, dust, and rodents. Bolt, fiercely covetous of his new letter, was loath to add B to this literary dustbin. He called for an organization and, knowing that he was the senior monk, suggested the letters be arranged according to his brothers' last names and MonkRankings. In other words, what we know today as alphabetical order was known for centuries as monkical or goatical order.

This theory, recently backed up by carbon dating of the letter B, has been propounded for years by monk scholar and linguist Steve Freid, author of the bestselling book Monk Like Me. A recent archaeological find has added even more credibility to Freid's hypotheses. Journals that appear to have been written by Bolt himself were recently unearthed in Yorkshire. To date they have been only partially translated, but there are already a number of startling discoveries. One telling excerpt reads:

"I have a close personal relationship with [God.] He calls me T-bone. Well, he calls everyone T-bone. He has told me that I must invent a new language symbol so people can spell my name. He says my new letter will be instrumental in the spelling of a Great History that he has planned. I know he would want me to celebrate this letter as much as possible and move it to the top of the Monk's Goat Beard."

(This last colloquialism is only roughly translated and has approximately the same meaning as "the pecking order.")

It doesn't take a Monk specialist like Freid to note that even after Bolt's suggestion was forced through the Council of the Goats, the alphabet was still not exactly as we know it today. It started with B, C, D and J.

Indeed, more recent history, while little known, is indisputable. The vowels did languish at the back of the alphabet until the early 19th century, when New Zealand activists waged a violent and ultimately successful campaign to have the vowels distributed evenly throughout. At the time, the activists' victory was so sweeping that the world even assented to let one vowel begin the modern alphabet, superceding B for the first time in thousands of years.

Unfortunately, broad abuses of its new power by the letter A and public backlash against equal rights for vowels wiped out the influence of letter advocates over the next few years. Ensuing debates over slavery and suffrage quashed the idea of vowel discrimination as a social injustice. Sadly, transconsonant letters like Y and W were never fully accepted, left to languish near the back of the alphabet and still misunderstood to this day. (See Appendix 2: "Mommy, Why is That Consonant Wearing Your Shoes?")

With the advent of public libraries and the spread of literacy, the English alphabet became cemented in the popular consciousness and the idea of alphabetical order taken for granted. By the time the American Civil War erupted, the alphabet had essentially taken the order we know today. The addition of Q and X at the turn of the century has been alternately attributed to anarchists, college students, and the emerging advertising industry, but most historians agree that Q and X don't really count anyway.

As Freid and his colleagues bring this too-long-untold story to light, it becomes clear how little of logic or reason there is in it. It also becomes clear that it is a compelling tale every school boy and girl should be taught around the same time they're drilled with a certain song we all know. Too many children think the alphabet ends W, X, Y, N, Z and not enough know the story of power hungry geniuses like Gregor Bolt and Emma Goldman.

In Chapter 1, we will examine the emergence of capitalization, the lower-case strike of 1932, and the irreparable rift it nearly drove through the heart of America.

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