Voice talent Jonathan Caws-Elwitt (of Silly Pillows fame) offers this mad-as-a-hatter rendition of our song about one-letter words (along with a few clever verses of his own). Give it a listen and we can compare laughs!

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt as the Statue of Frivolity.

"One-Letter Words”

One-letter words,

oh what I'd give for

a de-cluttered phrase.

To hear those

one letter words,

that's all I'd live for

the rest of my days.

And the feelings in my heart,

they tell sincerely.

No other words can tell it

half so clearly.

One-letter words,

twenty-six letters

which simply mean 'I love you.'

One-letter words.

Though I may stutter

or sound quite verbose,

I use those

one letter words,

lest I should utter

a phrase grandiose.

And the feelings in my heart,

they tell sincerely.

No other words can tell it

half so clearly.

One-letter words,

six vowels for vowing

my unfettered love for you.

One-letter words:

Compact concordance

To passions so strong

I can find no better words

Hence the importance

Of singing along!

And though the lingo of my love

Is alphabetic

Don’t ever think that I am

Apathetic

One-letter words

Words of one letter

That spell out my love for you!

Speaking of "you do the math," did we ever mention that Word Ways once claimed our scholarship was "mathematically impossible"?  That may very well constitute what our friend Jonathan calls a Retroactive Lifetime Goal.  Word Ways said: "This 232-page book claims that one thousand one-letter words exist.  Since there are only 26 letters, this is mathematically impossible."

Here is some one-letter maledicta from Life, 1918.  To decipher what those letters mean, see One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.

The Shakespeare Papers dedicated an entire issue to one-letter words, and here's one of the pages we contributed.  See our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.

Thanks to Nathalie Foy for exploring some of the surprisingly ghoulish definitions in our dictionary of one-letter words:

http://nathaliefoy.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/one-letter-words-a-dictionary-by-craig-conley/

Not a joke.  I found this on the shelf in the bookstore when I was looking at other dictionaries.  You can explore it online.

There’s not an awful lot to say about one-letter words, except that there are more than 1000 of them.  Many have to do with Roman numerals, music and science, but a fair few have some surprising definitions. 

By far the most interesting to me were these ghoulish definitions: 

You know the expression, “branded a thief”?  To the extent that I had ever thought about it, I’d assumed the phrase was metaphorical.  It’s not.  Until 1827 in America, thieves were, literally, branded on the thumb with the letter T.

And that is not all.  Humans have a long history of shaming and harming each other with branded or incised letters, apparently.

In Colonial America, drunkards were forced to wear the letter D, made of red cloth and sewn onto a white ground, so A is not the only scarlet letter.  Civil War deserters were branded with the letter D, as well, on the buttock, hip or cheek.  The letter was made with a hot iron or a razor.

Until 1822, the letter F (for “fray-maker”) was branded on the cheeks of people who fought in church.  Blasphemers were branded on the forehead with the letter B.

The ancient Romans branded false accusers with a K (for kalumnia, lie), and in England, R was used as a mark for rogues.

And on that cheerful note, I end my month of looking at dictionaries.  Happy Halloween, everyone!

Speaking of one-letter words, Annie Dillard collected her favorite maritime navigation codes, such as:

A  -  I am undergoing a speed trial.

D  -  Keep clear of me; I am maneuvering with difficulty.

F   -  I am disabled. Communicate with me.

G  -  I require a pilot.

F  -  Your lights are out, or burning badly.

U  -  You are standing into danger.

X  -  Stop carrying out your intentions.

K  -  You should stop your vessel instantly.

L   -  You should stop.  I have something important to communicate.

Our favorite:

R   -  You may feel your way past me.

Round kissing sun
Reassurance magnifying, shadowing
Marking the spot of one(ness)

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!