Blogtrek

The California Alphabet

California has a lot of things. It has energy crises, a governor so bad that he had to be recalled, people taking a cyanide trip to the other side of comet Hale-Bopp, movie superstars that try to outglitter the Milky Way but fail, and so forth. Now in this latest development in their three-ring circus that they call a Recall Election, California now has its own alphabet.

In kindergarten and early grade school, we learn the alphabet. We sing, "ABCDEFG…" That is the way we have always recognized the alphabet as being in order. But not in California any more. Due to the desire to randomize the candidates, the people running this Recall Election have invented their own alphabet. This means if you are a child in California, you now sing not "ABCDEFG…" but "RWQOJMV…" The entire California alphabet, in fact, reads:

RWQOJMVAHBSGZXNTCIEKUPDYFL

This has some interesting consequences. For example, if you look in an ordinary dictionary to try to find the first and last words, the first word is a and the last word is zymurgy (science of fermentation), or perhaps zyzzogeton (a leaf hopper) if you have an unabridged. But not in California. No, if you look in a California dictionary, you will find the first word to be rorqual, which is a variety of whale. Next comes row, as in rowdy, which is an apt way to describe this election. What's the last word? It is llano, an Argentine plain, just barely beating out llama, the animal.

So many of us are used to the ABC alphabet that we are unaware of some of the other alphabets around. For example, this very keyboard I am typing on generates the QWERTY alphabet:

QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM

Pangrams are sentences containing each letter of the alphabet. A 26-letter pangram contains each letter once and only once, and is scarce. But if you find them, you can use them as an alphabet:

SQUDGYFEZBLANKJIMPCRWTHVOX (Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox!)
CWMFJORDBANKGLYPHSVEXTQUIZ (Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz.)
TVQUIZDRAGNYMPHBLEWJFKSCOX (TV quiz drag nymph blew JFK's cox.)

Or you can reverse the alphabet:

ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

or take the odd letters first, then the even ones:

ACEGIKMOQSUWYBDFHJLNPRTVXZ

or take them by frequency of usage in English- get something like (not sure of the middle letters):

ETAOINSHRDLCUMPGWYFBVKJXQZ

So now we have 7 different ways of ordering the letters.

Actually what they are doing in California is using the RWQ alphabet for District 1, then they shift the R to the end for District 2:

WQOJMVAHBSGZXNTCIEKUPDYFLR

and then send the W to the end for District 3:

QOJMVAHBSGZXNTCIEKUPDYFLRW

And so forth.

In any case, this thing in California looks like a mess. Talk about confusing ballots! A punch-the-pregnant-chad ballot with 80 candidates, much more complicated than any in Florida in 2000. I hope it works out OK.