Not As Easy As ABC
By: Jason Park
Tags: History, Nonfiction, Microhistory, Books, Reading

Not As Easy As ABC

A review of Judith Flanders’ unconventional history of alphabetical order, *A Place For Everything*

When I was in high school, one of my favorite things to do was to come up with “unanswerable” questions. I thought they were unanswerable because no one had Google at their fingertips quite yet, and high schoolers’ internet searching skills were and still are truly hideous. One of those questions was “Which came first, the color ‘orange’ or the fruit ‘orange’? (It turns out the fruit was named first in English.) The other one, which is a little bit more unanswerable but I still never bothered to do an internet search for: “Why is the alphabet in the order that it is, and who decided it?” Well, that’s a big reason why I picked up Judith Flanders’ new book, A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. As you can imagine if you think of how little sourcing there would be for such a historical query, that is not exactly what the book is about (although I did get an answer to that question in my interview with Flanders). However, the book is a wonderful example of great microhistory, following the development and use of alphabetical order over time and place.

You may be thinking, like me, that alphabetical order is pretty natural and doesn’t require a lot of development. It probably just happened naturally. But at some point, you had to learn how to put things (or find things) in alphabetical order, and it probably didn’t come very naturally at first. Most likely, someone taught you how it worked. Alphabetical order’s need for development becomes clear in an excerpt from Giovanni Balbi’s Catholicon (a compendium of grammar) where he explains in minute detail how Balbi uses alphabetical order. Flanders explains:

Balbi’s long explanation brings into focus the work that goes into dictionaries, which, when we use them, seem straightforward, as though the dictionary maker has simply had to perform a mechanical task: Ab before Ac, and so on. For while alphabetical order is the most useful tool to find a word in a dictionary that has so far been devised, it is by no means the easiest tool to create a dictionary. Grouping words by type (slang, or technical words, or fields of knowledge), or by entry size (words like “go” and “run,” which require lengthy definitions and have a large number of meanings), or grammatically (verbs, nouns, adjectives) are all far easier for the dictionary writer to implement. In addition, endless decisions are required to alphabetize usefully. Where do abbreviations get placed? — does DIY go under “di,” or under “do” for “do it yourself ’? What about compound or hyphenated words? Post / Postilion / Post office, or Post / Post office / Postilion? What about words that have no letters, like 9/11? What happens to words with accents? Are those letters treated as though there is no accent, or are they ordered as though the accented letter is a separate entity? Alphabetization is easier to use than to produce, as Balbi’s explanation made clear.

In other portions of the book, Flanders also notes that absolute alphabetical order was not exclusively used until relatively recently, meaning that putting “Nesbitt” before “Nathan” would be just as correct as vice versa. It’s only later that there is a correct way to order “Nash” and “Nathan”, much less “Nat”, “Nathan” and “Nathaniel”.

Most of Flanders’ published work explores the Victorian era, so it is impressive that she delves deep into almost 5000 years of history all over the world with seeming ease. She even refuses to make the ultra-common mistake of starting the story of the development of printing with Johannes Gutenberg, choosing instead to trace the origins of movable type in China through its spread and modification in Korea before Gutenberg stole ideas from about fifteen different people to develop the movable type printing press. It’s details like this that give me confidence in a historian’s process, and Flanders exhibits fitness for that confidence throughout the book.

Alphabetical order, like any technology, had its detractors. Devotees to various faiths considered it a vice and a shortcut to the more meaningful memorization of locations and even ideas. Flanders relays a get-off-my-lawn-style rant against “kids these days” who used alphabetization:

The barrister Abraham Fraunce (c. 1559 — c. 1592/3), whose greater fame was as a poet under the patronage of Philip Sidney, trumpeted his discontent in an I-had-to-learn-the-hard-way-so-you-youngsters-should-too outburst: “I could heartily wish the whole body of our law to be rather logically ordered, than by alphabetical breviaries torn and dismembered. If any man say it cannot be . . . then I do not so much envy his great wisdom, as pity his rustical education, who had rather eat acorns with hogs, than breed [bread] with men, and prefer the loathsome tossing of an A.B.C. abridgement, before the lightsome perusing of a methodical coherence of the whole common law.”

In other ways, however, the use of alphabetical order does legitimately mark “a transition in worldview”. That seems so silly to say of what seems to most a benign innovation, but by the time you reach this point in A Place For Everything, you will see that alphabetization is not a neutral conduit. Flanders writes:

Just as the spread of alphabetically organized dictionaries and indexes had indicated a shift from seeing words purely as meaning to seeing them as a series of letters, so too the arrival of alphabetically ordered encyclopedias indicated a shift from seeing the world as a hierarchical, ordered place, explicable and comprehensible if only a person knew enough, to seeing it as a random series of events and people and places.

You may, like me, find that change in worldview nauseating. I would hate for my students to think world history is a “random series of events and people and places”. I would rather my students see it as “explicable and comprehensible if only a person knew enough”. But then again, that’s why I don’t arrange my world history class in alphabetical order. Doing so would be silly. And that’s where Flanders is spot on in her evaluation of the merits or demerits of alphabetization:

Alphabetical order is a means, not an end in itself. It is a system that permits us to organize large quantities of information, and to make it available to others whom we do not know, and who have no information regarding the people or ideas or intentions of those who originally produced and arranged it. There continue to be many ways of organizing, storing, and retrieving information, sometimes in the same way it originated, sometimes in a way that transforms it. Linnaeus’s taxonomy, and the periodic tables, are naming and classifying systems. The Dewey decimal system classifies, but does not name. Most museum exhibits are organizing, classifying, and displaying systems. Maps are displaying and also transforming systems, as are graphs and pie and bar charts. The importance is not the method, but a method, any method. “The human mind works by internalizing such arbitrary and useful tools, as a kind of grid onto which knowledge can be arranged, and from which it can be retrieved,” wrote the novelist A. S. Byatt. We think, therefore we sort.

In any sorting decision, there are going to be better and worse means of ordering. Some social scientists have provided evidence that the alphabetization of student names is discriminatory. In some cases, like a dictionary or encyclopedia, it may be the proper sorting technique. The key is to find a sorting means that helps you meet your ends. (You didn’t think a review of a book about alphabetical order could get this serious, did you?)

Flanders’ A Place For Everything is skilled in its job of telling a unique history through a means that is both interesting and historically sound. If such quirks of history enrapture you, I would heartily recommend this book. And if you haven’t already, check out my interview with Judith Flanders for more about how she came to the topic, the process of writing history, and more.

I received a review copy of A Place For Everything courtesy of Basic Books and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.