There’s Murphy’s Law coined by American aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy, Jr. in 1948, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”, and then there’s the multi-part Murphry’s Law coined by Australian editor John Bangsund in 1992.  “A. If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; B. If an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; C. the stronger the sentiment expressed in a. and b., the greater the fault; D. any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.” He added that “if a mistake is as plain as the nose on your face, everyone can see it but you.  Your readers will always notice errors in a title, in headings, in the first paragraph of anything, and in the top lines of a new page.  These are the very places where authors, editors, and proofreaders are most likely to make mistakes.” 

I read about Murphry’s Law in a library book, “Just My Typo,” by Drummond Moir, a compilation of glaring and amusing typos.  For example, in the late 1800s Brett Harte wrote in his newspaper that “Mrs. Jones has long been known for her charity,” but the typesetter accidentally changed “charity” to “chastity.”  The proofreader put a question mark by that to indicate the original copy should be checked, and the article came out in the paper as “Mrs. Jones has long been known for her chastity (?).”  Another doozy appeared in the 1977 book “Easy Sky Diving Book,” a line in which read “state zip code” instead of the intended “pull rip cord.”  We won’t dwell on how many times I’ve dropped the first “l” from “public library,” reflecting instead that proofreaders, editors and librarians would all be hurting without our alphabet.  Fortunately there are many versions of English language alphabets.  As Dr. Seuss rhymed, “My alphabet starts with the letter called yuzz.  It’s the letter I use to spell yuzz a ma tuzz.  You’ll be sort of surprised what there can be found once you go beyond Z and start poking around.”  Indeed!  Consider “The Definitive Cockney Alphabet” described in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.  “It has also been called the Cabbies’ Alphabet or the Subversive Alphabet.”  Its origin is unclear, with attributions being made to 1930s radio comedians and music hall performers. Most of its letters have several possibilities, as in “A for horses (Hay for Horses)” and “A for Gardner (Ava Gardner).”  Rounding out the ABCs are “B for mutton” and “C for yourself.”  

Then there’s Shel Silverstein’s infamous, and hilarious, “Uncle Shelby’s ABZ: A Primer for Tender Young Minds,” that first appeared six pages after the centerfold in the August 1961 issue of Playboy Magazine.  It came out in book form the same year, and in many later editions, although in 1985 the subtitle was changed to “A Primer for Adults Only.”  Silverstein’s letter E provides a mild example for the change: “E is for egg.  See the egg.  The egg is full of slimy gooey white stuff and icky yellow stuff.  Do you like to eat eggs?  E is also for Ernie.  Ernie is the genie who lives in the ceiling. Ernie loves eggs.  Take a nice fresh egg and throw it as high as you can and yell ‘Catch, Ernie! Catch the egg!’ And Ernie will reach down and catch the egg.”   Silverstein didn’t care for children, and his satiric book reflects that.  In its introduction he wrote, “the little ones have always had a very special place in his tired old heart.  Yes, I have heard them crying late at night, and I have thought about them.  I have heard them playing outside my window while I was trying to sleep, and I have thought about them.  I have seen the pictures they have drawn on my car, and I have thought and thought and thought about them.  And so this book, to help all my little friends get all the things in life they so richly deserve.”  The book includes reasons for putting sugar in the gas tank of daddy’s car, assurances the grocer is giving away ponies, drinking ink is fun, ends with “The paper in this book is not really paper.  It is made from candy.  The end.”  The American Library Association lists Silverstein’s among the country’s most banned authors, but, ironically enough, mostly for his gentle classic really intended for kids, “The Giving Tree.”.

The Desert alphabet is a “phonemic,” or “sound-related” alphabet created in 1854 under the guidance of Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to Wikipedia. Young, like Mark Twain, considered “the English alphabet is pure insanity …. It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty.”  He instructed his secretary, George Darling Watt, to create a less confusing alphabet with new symbols that would allow immigrants to communicate better while helping to “transform society.”  Despite heavy and costly promotion by the Mormon church, Watt’s symbols proved unpopular, and the new system never caught on. 

The New Yorker weighed in last August with Josh Lieb’s “The Alphabet: A Newcomer’s Guide,” which begins “A,B,C: The ‘Big Three’.  No one can claim to be an expert on the alphabet without being pretty familiar with these bad boys. Old money. So important that they’re often used as shorthand for the whole damn thing.  D: A second-rate ‘B’. Feel free to skip.  E: A biggie. The most-used letter in the whole ’phabet. Kind of annoying, actually, but if you’re trying to crack a code/buy a vowel on a game show, this is the letter for you. F: Good for swear words. Otherwise, meh. G, H, I: Role players. They do their part.”  It ends with “Y: Also a misfit, but benign compared with its immediate neighbors. The weird girl in high school you wish you’d been nicer to.  Z: “Z” knows he’s a bad boy—that’s why he’s last. A lot like “X,” but way more relatable. “X” is science fiction; “Z” is a biker movie. “Z” doesn’t care if he lives or dies .… Why does Z even exist? Because we want him to.”

So where did the alphabet we use today come from?  “Who Invented the Alphabet,” a Smithsonian article by Lydia Wilson, described how the ancient Sinai desert was regularly ransacked by prospectors looking for rare minerals, especially turquoise, “a stone that symbolized rebirth, a vital motif in Egyptian culture.”  4,000 years ago, nodules of turquoise were discovered and mined on a plateau called Serabit-el-Khadim where a temple there was dedicated to Hathor, “the goddess of turquoise, (among many other things).”  In 1905 pioneering English archeologists William and Hilda Flinders Petrie, a married couple, excavated the temple and “discovered curious signs on the side of a mine, and began to notice them elsewhere, on walls and small statues. Some signs were clearly related to hieroglyphs, yet they were simpler than the beautiful pictorial Egyptian script on the temple walls. The Petries recognized the signs as an alphabet.”  Israeli archeologist Orly Goldwasser “explained how miners on Sinai would have gone about transforming a hieroglyph into a letter: ‘Call the picture by name, pick up only the first sound and discard the picture from your mind.’  Thus, the hieroglyph for an ox, aleph, [an upside down “A”] helped give a shape to the letter ‘a,’ while the alphabet’s inventors derived ‘b’ from the hieroglyph for ‘house’, bêt. These first two signs came to form the name of the system itself: alphabet. Some letters were borrowed from hieroglyphs, others drawn from life, until all the sounds of the language they spoke could be represented in written form.”

William Flinders Petrie was an archeological prodigy.  He was a sickly child and educated at home, according to the Britannica, and he developed an interest in Egyptology.  He “invented a sequence dating method that made possible the reconstruction of history from the remains of ancient cultures,” particularly pottery sherds.  His contemporaries poo-pooed this notion, but “with the progressive sophistication of archaeology, the examination and classification of broken pottery became routine procedure.”  He also was the second person to utilize stratification in his excavations, and this “marked the beginning of the examination of successive levels of a site, rather than the previously practiced method of haphazard digging, which had produced only a jumble of unrelated artifacts.”  That’s why Flinders Petrie’s known today as “the father of archeology.”

He’s not “the father of the Petri dish,” however.  That title belongs to Julius Richard Petri, a military physician who in 1877, “designed “that glass, flat dish with a cover that fits right over it. And that was terrific, according to science historian Howard Markel in a 2011 PBS interview, because not only could you keep contaminants from getting in, but you could slide it under the microscope, put it right on the stage of the microscope and view your specimens,”. Not much is known about Petri’s personal life.  It’s possible he was a great lover according to Miguel Cervantes’ criteria: “One who has not only the four S’s [sage, solitary, solicitous, secret], which are required in every good lover, but even the whole alphabet; as for example… Agreeable, Bountiful, Constant, Dutiful, Easy, Faithful, Gallant, Honorable, Ingenious, Kind, Loyal, Mild, Noble, Officious, Prudent, Quiet, Rich, Secret, True, Valiant, Wise; the X indeed, is too harsh a letter to agree with him, but he is Young and Zealous.”