A Story About the Alphabet and an Alpha Human That I Met

Dear friends,

I have a linguistic adventure to share today.

A few weeks ago, I posted this to my various social media platforms:

“A H R B Q D W E F L M N S X G I J K O P C T V Y U Z

That’s the alphabet in alphabetical order.”

A lot of people seemed to enjoy it, a few people argued about different ways of spelling different letters, a good time was had by most!

Then, in the past day or so, someone tagged me on BlueSky because someone ELSE had posted their own version of it:

Someone on BlueSky responded and asked “Isn’t this Myq Kaplan’s?”

And here’s the thing, I certainly don’t OWN the alphabet. I don’t even have any particular unique claim to this concept. I mean, I thought it would be fun to alphabetize the alphabet (because it’s weird that some of the letters don’t start with themselves when you spell them out, you know?), but I’m not at all surprised that other people have thought of the same idea. Parallel thinking happens!

Then this exchange happened: