Less Than Double
So God and I were discussing the evolution of language and we got onto the subject of the names of letters. My one big complaint about the names of letters is the “double you” character. The thing that bothers me is that all the other letters have single syllable names and double-you is three, it just doesn’t seem right.
Of course, this didn’t bother me all that much until the advent of the World Wide Web, when I was suddenly confronted by having to frequently deal with an acronym that was much longer to pronounce then the phrase that it stood for. I side with the all-too-small contingent that supports shortening it’s name to just “dub.”
So then God asked me if that was the only thing that bothered me about it. It was the only thing I could think of. Then she reminded me of all the times that I’d complained that it should be called “double vee” rather than “double you,” a practice that the French maintain. I admitted that was an issue, but felt that it was now moot, since shortening it to just dub fixed that problem as well.
Then God pointed out to me that in printing the character glyph looks like two vees but in lower-case cursive it looks more like two yous, so maybe the naming showed an English bias towards cursive.
But, I asked, isn’t one of the commandments, “Thou shalt not cursive?”
Right about then, I found I was alone again.
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