CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
An ornate capital T, with skull. From the Phamacy Department's page of Purdue's 1898 yearbook. It would seem the pharmaceutical industry has never really been about your well-being.
It's not as simple as X marking a spot on the map. "There were people from North X, South X, East X, and West X, from X Upper Corner, X Lower Corner, and X Four Corners, and everybody had brought his uncle and cousins." From St. Nicholas, 1879.
Here are someone whose hair is on fire and the unknown Madame X. From Le Journal Amusant, 1898. For dozens upon dozens of surprising meanings of the letter X, see our very own One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.
In 1969, Georges Perec wrote a 300-page novel in French without using the letter e. Sixty-five years earlier, we have this French passage with only e's. From L'Album Comique de la Famille, 1904.