We stumbled upon a spooky yet poetic mention of
one-letter words in an article about brainstorming for graphic designers:
[J]ot down some one letter words that best describe your idea.
For example: sunset, skeleton, dark and death.
Sunset, skeleton, dark, and death. Are these truly one-letter words? (Delightful of you to ask, by the way!) They are, indeed!
Sunsets recall more than a single one-letter word: While the French poet Victor Hugo famously said that "O is the sun," astronomers use a different one-letter word to designate the class of yellow stars to which our sun belongs: G. Additionally, in the ionosphere, the E layer develops around sunset, at an altitude of 90-130km.
Skeletons recall the letter R. In organic chemistry, "The letter R represents the carbon skeleton of the molecule" (Gerard Tortora, Principles of Anatomy and Physiology, 2005). And novelist William Gibson has noted "the color of glow-in-the-dark toy skeletons, each with its own iconic M" (Pattern Recognition, 2003).
Darkness recalls M, a state of deep, dreamless sleep in which consciousness is "lost in darkness" (Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, 1974). Poet Tom Sleigh describes an injured driver's face, "each eye / an x of darkness" ("The Wreck," The Dreamhouse, 1999).
Death recalls Z, as in Arnold Yarrow's Death is a Z (1978). It also recalls O, as in cultural theorist Earl Jackson, Jr.'s "big O of death" (Strategies of Deviance, 1995).
Sunset, skeleton, dark, and death: all highly evocative definitions of our ABCs!
