99% Invisible - 468- Alphabetical Order

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

In much of the western world, alphabetical order is simply a default we take for granted. It’s often the one we try first -- or the one we use as a last resort when all the other ordering methods fail. It’s boring, but it works, and it’s so ingrained that it’s hard to imagine not using it. But despite its endurance for most of its history, the alphabet wasn’t initially used to order much of anything. Judith Flanders, author of A Place For Everything, a history of alphabetical order, says that in societies like ancient Rome and early medieval Europe, writing implements were still rare. So what mattered most was organizing knowledge in a way that helped you to memorize it. And that was usually much easier to do in the order you naturally came across the information, like: chronologically, or by size, or geography, or region, or hierarchically.Alphabetical Order

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. That is the sound of exactly 2008 trimmers pounding away in perfect synchronicity during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The entire stadium pitched into darkness as the traditional Chinese faux-drammed globe from within. It was just the start of a ceremony widely regarded as the most elaborate in the Olympic history, and it was all designed and executed perfectly. But behind the scenes there was one small hitch in the coverage of the event

that went mostly unreported. That's producer Daniel Seymour. During the parade of nations, Greece has the birthplace of the Olympics and at first that's a longstanding tradition. But then the rest of the teams came out according to the number of strokes in the Chinese characters that comprise their name. The country of Jamaica, for example, was followed by Belgium. Then came Bonoatu, which in turn was followed by Israel.

The US team walked out somewhere in the middle. My home country of Australia was right at the back, 200 and second in line. Ultimately, the sequence of nations was just a small detail. In a 4 hour, $300 million ceremony, it should not have been the hard part. But for the Western networks covering the games, the parade proved a little tricky. Because it seems to us perfectly natural that the teams march in an alphabetical order. That's Judith Flanders, author of a place for everything, a book about the order of the Latin alphabet.

So it made all of the Western Network scramble because they simply didn't know when their own teams were going to come in and when they could go to commercial breaks. In the confusion of trying to figure out which countries came after which breaks, NBC later posted the footage to their website in the wrong order. This in turn sparked a short-lived message board conspiracy theory that the networks had deliberately changed up the order of nations in order to increase site traffic.

You know, despite the fact that probably if you had asked the organizers doing the Olympic coverage, they would have known that Chinese does not use an alphabet, but it didn't quite penetrate. So in that way you see how deeply embedded the alphabet is in our psyches. For much of the Western world, alphabetical order is the default. It's often the one we try first, or the one we use as a last resort when all other ordering methods fail. It's boring, but it works, and it's so ingrained that it's hard to imagine not using it.

Except at one point, we didn't. Alphabetical order, as a way to organize information, is a pretty recent development, and its adoption is part of a radical shift in the way human beings learn, organize their thoughts, and even see their place in the way human beings learn, organize their thoughts, and even see their place in the world. But before you can order anything alphabetically, you need an alphabet. The alphabet is a concept of applying symbols to sounds and saying this stands for this and this only.

That's Timothy Donaldson, a type designer and lecturer at Formathe University in England and author of the book Shapes for Sounds. And Donaldson says that the process of assigning sounds to symbols took a long time, because at first all we had were pictograms, images that represented whole objects or concepts, like in very early Sumerian writing. So if you wanted to represent the idea of a fish, you drew a fish. But what the problem it brings with it is you need a massive amount of symbols. You need thousands of symbols to represent every single thing.

So the system is unwieldy. Eventually these pictograms changed and became more abstract, and by 2800 BCE, certain marks began to represent syllables. But not individual consonants or vowels, so there might be a symbol for an entire syllable, like ga, but nothing yet for its component ga and ga sounds individually, meaning each syllable in a language needed a sign. And they could get by with about 700 symbols. We call our syllabary.

But a syllabary still isn't an alphabet. But at some point, some clever, early, Semitic speaking, someone saw that the Egyptians were writing stuff down and said, hey, we can do that for my language. That's Peter Daniels, an independent scholar specializing in ancient writing systems. Daniels says that the Egyptians were using their uncomplicated non-syllabic system of symbols. When our hypothetical early Semitic someone decided to take that Egyptian system and simplify it.

Because this clever inventor had the brilliant idea to use just one consonant per letter, still no vowels, but with those consonants they could write anything that needed to be written. Developing what some scholars considered to be the first true alphabet, and with it, the first alphabetical order. In that first ever alphabetical order, would be instantly recognizable. It's the same basic order that the Latin alphabet uses today. In the 1940s, archaeologists found a set of small tablets

with some 3,200-year-old lettering in the ancient city of Ugarit in present-day Syria. With nothing on them, but the 30 letters of the Ugaritic alphabet, and they were all written in the familiar order that became ABCDEF, etc. Everything from A to T. T was the last letter in that particular alphabetical order. The exact shapes of the ugaritic letters would go through a lot of changes as they got adapted. Early on by the Phoenicians, then the Greeks, and later the Romans. But the basic order was there from the beginning.

But that raises a fundamental question. Why that order? Why ABC and not NQD or RGL? And the answer is, well, we don't know. It was a long time ago. Okay, fair. There's no particular reason we just learn the alphabet in the order it's in. There was, however, at least one competing alphabetical order from around that same time,

found into southern Arabian peninsula in present-day Yemen and Oman. So similar alphabet, but different sequence. It went H, L, a strange looking letter, I can't pronounce or recognize M, R, etc. But outside of a few small areas, this other order never caught on. And for the usual reason. The one that went out was the one that was used by the people that went out and conquered other people. That just happens.

The South Arabian people were more limited in their conquering. The Romans, on the other hand, love conquering. And as they conquered, they spread their alphabetical order around. Although not before making some last-minute tweaks, take the final two letters, Y and Z. The Romans in Houston. Tim Donaldson says that the ancient Greek equivalents of Y and Z had previously been disfersed in the middle of the Greek alphabet.

But then the Romans chucked them out. Yeah, yeah, it was literally how it happened. And then eventually they found that they were useful so they got brought back into the fold. That's where they're at the end. The letter K was luckier. It was also kicked out at some point, but then brought back in at the same spot as before. They also tried to introduce three new Roman letters and it just didn't work.

Well, we're the ones. One was called diagama and one looks, I can't remember the name of the other two, even though I wrote a book about it. So for the most part, the alphabets order has proved remarkably stable. But despite its endurance, for most of its history, alphabetical order wasn't actually used to order much of anything. Alphabetical order was not all that important for anything beyond learning the alphabet. In societies like Ancient Rome and early medieval Europe, writing implements were still rare. So what mattered most was organizing knowledge

in a way that helped you to memorize it. And that was usually much easier to do in the order you naturally came across the information. So you might memorize the names of kings in chronological order, following who began who, or all the towns along the coastline from east to west. And Judith Flander says that this means in most cases, alphabetical order would have been kind of useless.

And the way I've begun to think of it is to say to people, okay put the days the week enough, medical order. Let's see. Friday, Monday, and there's always a very long pause. Thursday, Tuesday. Because we don't think of them that way. We started Monday. Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday. Jesus. So when it came to sorting and organizing actual information, for thousands of years, people used almost any other method. They organized things by size, by geography, by chronology, just not alphabetically. But these early ordering methods also reflected the way people thought about the world, and one important way that they thought about it was hierarchically.

In the Middle Ages, for example, William the Conqueror's Doomsday book, which was a survey of all his subjects' property assets, was divided into sections that started with the nobles and ended with the peasants. So you moved down not alphabetically, but through more or less who had more money and who had more power. Church documents also tended to reflect this hierarchical view. Where the church fathers come first and then other theological writers, then other less important writers, and finally, Wismer, pagan writers. They weren't even Christian, and they trail in the end

because they're not important. But nowhere was this hierarchical world that you're more apparent than an encyclopedias. These books were primarily religious documents written by adjabishops and monks who were attempting to create what they called a mirror of the world. Starting with God, the angels, and the saints at the front,

and plants and inanimate objects at the very back. Humans were usually somewhere in the middle. Theological books might have glossaries of difficult terms at the back, but these would be organized in the order they appear in the book, not alphabetically. Because in a world where knowledge was considered complete and holistic, the point was not to look up only the facts you needed, but to read the book from beginning to end. You might occasionally come across a merchant's invoice or one small part of a dictionary organized alphabetically, but even as late as the Middle Ages, alphabetical order was still so rare that

anytime someone used it in a book, they would have to explain it. So you'd get this kind of primer from the author at the beginning, where he might say, if the topic you're interested in starts with Z, try looking towards the end. And it's perfectly clear. He thinks he has invented it. And then each time another person uses it. They too explain it over and over. Slowly though, little by little, alphabetical order would start to catch on. We can't say why exactly, but Judith Flann is points to one potential reason, at least for those who knew their ABCs. Every other sorting order, you need to know a little bit about the subject to help you find things.

Alpha-bethical order is the only sorting order that we have where you do not need to have any preliminary knowledge. In this proved useful, in a world where increasingly, there was just too much to remember. In the 11th and 12th centuries, with the arrival of paper technology from China, writing something down started to become a lot cheaper and more attractive than trying to memorize it. For theology students at European universities, this helped facilitate a new form of learning, one in which arguments and counter

arguments were expected to be backed up by written evidence, but it also meant that now you have to know where to find all those sources so you could cite them correctly. So scholars began developing innovative ways to search for information, indexing, pagination, methods for cross referencing one thing with another. And this brings with it the development of all of these things that help us locate things or, as I call it, look stuff up. We become a look stuff up world. And one of the handiest ways to look stuff up was simply by name.

With Alvedic order, you didn't need to be an expert in a field to know where to find something. the handiest ways to look stuff up was simply my name. Traveling French is a complete comprehension, but now they would have a small booklet with them which would provide talking points on different subjects from the Bible just in time for the next sermon. So what these were is effectively, they were cheat sheets, and to make them easier to use they were put in alphabetical order. Another big factor in the rise of alphabetical order was the arrival in the 15th century of the printing press. Now that books were easy to copy, publishers realized they could make big money selling multiple copies of a single title, and the best sellers often turned out to be reference books. At first, many of these reference books still strive to be

mirrors of the world, organized hierarchically. But as enlightenment and cyclopetus, like Dittarrow, incorporated more and more entries for more and more contributors, the easiest way to add a new entry without shuffling everything else around was just to organize it alphabetically. And so they cite the great hierarchy schemes, but they don't use it. And instead they say they're going to use alphabetical order because it is pre-commoded, a pre-facil, more convenient and easier.

But even as scholars were busy alphabetizing the angels, other members of the establishment weren't happy about this new method of dividing up the world. To understand why, Flanders points to a 16th century bibliography dedicated to the King of France. And the compiler apologizes in his preface for putting it in alphabetical order. Because he says this might mean servants come before masters and children before their parents. It upends hierarchy, and

it is dangerous." Even worse, this was a way of organizing knowledge that allowed any literate person to choose what to learn. Without a better order, knowledge was no longer a fixed set of ideas to be handed down by learned authorities. Instead, it was up to the individual to decide what was worth discovering and what could be ignored. So if you've got gatekeepers to knowledge, those gatekeepers are going to think we're going to be out of work soon. And this feeling wasn't just restricted to a bunch of royal reactionaries in the 1500s. Alphabetical order's biggest hater was probably the early 19th century English poet,

Samuel Taylor Colrich. Colrich! He just despised it! Colrich saved a special place in hell for the encyclopedia Britannica, which was, of course, organized alphabetically. As a theologian, as well as a poet, he believed in the great hierarchy of knowledge, and he thought Britain's pre-eminent reference book should reflect that. And he said, yes, it reflects the world. But once it's in this arbitrary and he thought

ridiculous order Aka Apple comes first just because it starts with A. What you've got is a broken mirror on the ground, each reflecting a little bit of the world but making no overall sense. Which I'll admit, as far as literary criticism goes, is kind of beautiful. I mean, he was a poet. But he was also a snob. The kind of sub-stack writing intellectual that alphabetical order had been undermining all along. So if anything, his objections made him seem a little out of touch. He was even parodied and novels as quote, the chemical botanical, geological, astronomical, mathematical, metaphysical, meteorological, anatomical, physiological, galvanistical, musical, pictorial, bibliographical, crucial, philosopher. In other words, he was an insufferable note all.

The truth is, by the time guys like Coleridge were shouting at alphabetical order to get off their lawn, the battle was already over. At some point, when no one was looking, without needing a great champion to advance it or campaign to promote it, alphabetical order had won. And other possibilities sort of faded. People lost sight of the fact that there are other possibilities. Today organizing information according to its name has become so commonplace that it often just goes unnoticed,

but it still commens with its own biases. Just ask anyone whose name starts with a letter at the end of the alphabet. Academic economists are more likely to be cited, get jobs at prestigious universities, and even win Nobel prizes if their names are higher up in the alphabet. Political candidates are more likely to win if they have early alphabet names rather than late names. There is even something called alphabet fatigue, which is a phenomenon where a dictionary or encyclopedia team becomes less and less thorough as they move through the letters. The first alphabetized edition of encyclopedia Britannica had three volumes, each of roughly

equal length, volume 1, was a through b. And of course, as we know, there are plenty of cultures and languages and civilizations that have done perfectly nicely without Nelfbed, and they have no problem with other sorting systems. During the Ming Dynasty in the 15th century China, the largest general encyclopedia in history was organized according to a well-known rhyming scheme. It remained the world's largest reference book for six centuries, and it worked just fine. And in the 21st century, people have started turning to other ways of finding and sorting information.

Even as much of the internet's underlying infrastructure depends on it, no one uses alphabetical order to search through Wikipedia or to decide which article to click on next. Instead of indexes organized alphabetically, we have hyperlinks leading in a thousand different directions. Avertical order may have won when no one was looking, but now, just as quietly, it's being rendered obsolete. So we may discover that alphabetical order is a phase, an eighth century phase, but it might be a phase. Do we have a code for this story? Yes we do. After this. So we're here again with Daniel Simo. Hey, Dan. Hey, Roman. Before I let you go, I heard you have one more thing that you wanted to share with us regarding alphabetical order.

Yeah, I do. And I wanted to save it for the code up because, you know, as a reporter, one of the things I love the most is when someone I'm interviewing really hates one of their subjects. And it turns out that Judith Flann does really, really hates someone. And I found this out towards the end of the interview when I was wrapping things up and I asked my standard kind of wrap up question and I just want to play you some of that tape. Do there is anything that we haven't touched on that you think would be important to mention? There isn't the only thing I wonder if you want me to do just because you said you wanted a couple of sort of character driven things.

Yeah, yeah. It is the hideous Melville, Joey. At which point you're like, oh, yes, please talk about the hideous Melville, do you? Exactly. Yes, please. Yeah. I mean, you know, Joey is not interesting in terms of alphabetical order, except he didn't use it.

But he was so ghastly. I mean, apart from anything else, the moron spelled his name, but he was so ghastly. I mean, apart from anything else, the moron spelled his name, M-E-L-V-I-L. I mean, really? I didn't think I could love due to flander's anymore, but I really enjoy how much C-seems to not enjoy Melville. Do we? Yeah. And so Melville, do we, for those who don't know, the inventor of the Dewey decimal system or officially the Dewey

decimal classification or DDC, which is a sorting method for libraries that is still very common in the US and many libraries today. So apart from the objectionable way that due to things he spells his name, what doesn't she like about him? Well, she's got a few issues. So basically Melville Dewey was born in a small town in upstate New York in 1851. And he actually changed the spelling of his name when he was quite young because he was a fan of the movement at the time to simplify English spelling. For a while, he even changed the spelling of his last name to DUI. But didn't stick? No, that one didn't stick. Apparently, the bank refused to recognize his signature, so. Yeah, if you can't catch checks, then it doesn't stick. Exactly. So,

DUI, D-E-W-E-Y, graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Judith Flandes says that soon after he was made a librarian there. So he's still in his twenties, but he was asked to catalog its library. The odds are pretty good. He didn't know much about library classification, so he returned to the idea of a hierarchy of knowledge, which is based on the older classical liberal arts idea. And it's important to point out that a lot of libraries back then, just like now, were already organized by subject, at least on some level. So all the calculus books would be in one place and all the American history books would be in another. But do he took the basic idea and kind of when, let's say mad with power,

he really believed just like Coleridge, that all knowledge was connected in this elegant hierarchy. So in his new system, once you got to the subject area, it would just be divided into smaller subject areas, which themselves would be divided into yet smaller subject areas and so on and so on. So it becomes subjects all the way down. Yeah. And this was his eponymous dewey decimal system, dewey decimal classification. And the reason it has the word decimal in there is because all of these

subjects were assigned numbers. So, for example, the 500s are natural sciences, 590s zoology, 595 is other invertebrates, 595.7s, the insight, and eventually you get to butterflies if you follow along. Yeah, well, that makes sense. Okay. It doesn't seem like this is a real problem so far. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It wasn't totally a bad idea. And perhaps more importantly, at that time, it offered this kind of ready-made, off-the-rack solution for organizing books.

And it ended up getting picked up by a lot of these institutions throughout the second half of the 19th century. So even if it's not perfect, it's used so widely that you could go to any library in the country and know where to find things. And that's probably its biggest advantage. Definitely. It's ubiquity basically. But Judith Flinders points out that it had a few big problems.

The benefit is, if you want to find out about the subject you work at, which its number is, you go to the shelves and there are all the books. So it helps you find out about a subject more generally. What it doesn't do is help you find a specific book. And this is sort of the crux. So if you're looking for a specific book, and you don't know where to classify it, you know, like in the 0.7.6.3 way, you know, it may be hierarchical, it may be logical, but it's not really all that intuitive of where you place every book in the human world. No, it's not.

So, do we have no choice but to pair his system with a card catalog, which would tell you where to find the book? And do you want to guess what sorting method to do a decimal system card catalog uses? I don't need to guess, it's alphabetical order. Yep, our old friend. So in the end, you know, as much as you want to order the world into these blocks of 100 numbers and subdivided and subdivided and subdivided. When you get to the bottom, you have to get to alphabetical order.

It sort of underlies everything. Yeah, yeah. Although it should be pointed out that, do he manage to turn this to his advantage? Because what do he did was to push the American Library Association, which he had co-founded in 1876, to standardize that index card size and to then use a company he created called the Library Bureau to provide all the supplies needed

to manage those card catalogs? Whoa. That's very enterprising and a little bit sneaky. I mean, is this the reason why Judith hates him? Like, because of this, you know, way of profiting from the library system. No, it's

not. Instead, it turns out that the card catalog is the least of the Dewey systems problems. Because when you start digging into its classification system, you soon realize that the problem was mostly duey himself and how he saw the world. All sorting systems have biases. Dewey's has more biases than most, and in the modern world it is particularly troublesome. particularly troublesome. It is entirely Anglo-centric. It is almost comically Christian-centric. So Christianity was given all the numbers between 200 and

289 whereas Islam is given only a single number 297. Oh and women are originally categorized very neatly next to etiquette. Bitter? Me? No, not at all. But beyond the system that he created, there was just do-e the man. Do-e himself was a mind-blowingly awful person. I say this with complete prejudice. He founded the American Library Association, but was forced to step down when four women complained that he had assaulted them in a two-week period. He was anti-Semitic, he was racist, even in anti-Semitic and racist days. He was considered to be pretty horrible, so he was also asked to stand down from his

position as librarian for New York State for his Christian white-only policies. And if you can imagine in those times it must have taken an awful lot for him to get to that stage. Wow, it had some vague notion that Dui was a problem, but I had no idea just how awful he really was. Yeah, yeah, he definitely was. And because of all this undeniable awfulness, the American Library Association recently decided to take his name off their top leadership honor. It used to be called the Melville-Duey Medal, but in 2020 it was changed to the ALA Medal

of excellence. But the thing is, even if Jewie himself isn't well remembered, his system is still going strong. Despite the fact that it just doesn't work very well anymore, but of course, undoing an entire library and recategorizing becomes very difficult so people on the whole don't. So other sorting methods have been developed, and the Library of Congress has its own system. But according to recent estimates, roughly 200,000 libraries in 135 countries still use the Dewey Decimal classification. Wow. So Dewey dictates them, but the world embraced them early

and then therefore we're just gonna stuck with Dewey's hierarchy for better or worse. Very much so. Thank you Dan. Thanks, Norman. 99% of visible was produced this week by Daniel Seemo, edited by Joe Rosenberg, mixed in tech production by Amida Ganatra, music by a director of Sound Swan Rihau. The only hall is ours that could

produce her, Kurt Colestead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Lajma Don, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Baroube, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Serious XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars on the show at 9-9-PI-O work. On Instagram and read it too. You can find links to Stitcher shows I love, as well as

every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. Here's the fact I didn't know until I had kids in my thirties. Seriously, it blew my mind. Stitcher, serious exam.