Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Letter Q

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the letter Q is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Get tickets to see us LIVE at the London Podcast Festival this September: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/comedy/secretly-incredibly-fascinating/

Folks, I hope you've heard on other episodes. We are doing a live episode of our show at the London Podcast Festival, and we'd love to see you in London. Me and Katie are meeting up there. Tickets are available through the London Podcast Festival. There's a link in the description of this episode to get them as well, so go straight there. And we'd love to see you in London.

The letter Q, known for being alphabet. Famous for having a tail, too. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the letter Q is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of the letter Q? I don't use it. I don't need it. I've never used it. I use K's. K is enough. It's in my

name. It makes the same sound. So, you know, anytime I'm going to use a Q, use a K instead. Question, Queen. You can do a K and a W and it does the same exact thing. So it's to me, unimportant letter. Don't need it. That is going to be a perfect segue into the first takeaway and a lot of quotes by famous writers and people. Yes. So good. Okay.

See, I'm just like famous writers and people. I feel like it is... I usually try to lend some grace to the subject of the episode that we're about to record, but no. The letter itself does not deserve respect because every word could just, we could do a K and W. It turns out that's true, at least in English. And it's a very relatively rare letter in English, yet it's definitely an official letter. So it's a perfect topic for stuff. It's kind of a oddity that absolutely everyone has heard of.

Yes. What about you, Alex? How do you feel about the letter? It really doesn't come up a lot in my life. And the one way it has was something that people got excited about on Discord. There's past CIF episodes about the letter X and the letter Y. So this is our latest letter episode. I'll link the others. By the way, thank you to Jason Stash on the Discord

for suggesting this, and it ran away in the polls. A lot of people posted the character Q from Star Trek The Next Generation. Oh, right. That guy. A sort of puckish, chaotic figure. So that's a fun character played by John Delancey in TNG and in a lot of Star Trek. Yeah. TNG and then a lot of Star Trek. Yeah, he had powers. He would materialize

mariachi bands and so on. Yeah, he would. They'd be trying to do serious space boy stuff and then he'd be like, what if you were all goldfish? Bam, it's done. Yeah, and Q is one member of a species of beings, also called the Q, that live in a Q continuum. I know this sounds like nonsense to people who have not seen Star Trek, but according to the fan wiki memory alpha, Gene Roddenberry came up with Q to stretch out the premiere to two hours instead of one hour.

And also Q is named after a Trek fan in the UK whose name is Janet Quarton. So that's where it comes from, somebody with a Q last name. I like that. It's just like we didn't have any ideas. So we just made a character that could do anything because we needed to get more time in this episode. We're like, wharf, boring. Data, robot, boring.

Space, stupid. A Klingon on the crew? Who cares? Not interesting. That won't be worth exploring. Stupid, yeah. Yeah, so Q is fun. I'm glad to think about them.

But this episode is all about the letter. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. Quick, which I spell K-W-I-C-K. This week that's in a segment called Read Stats, Just Do It, With The Numbers You'll Prove It. Read Stats, Just Do It, When You Wanna Know. The name was submitted by Fiona Sapp. We have a new name for this every week.

Please make a Missillian Wacking Bazz possible, submit through Discord or to sifpotatgmail.com. Thank you, Fiona. The first numbers this week lead straight into takeaways, but the first number is 24th out of 26. 24th out of 26. That's the letter Q's approximate ranking and overall usage in English. It's used more than X and it's used more than Z. That's it. Right. I thought you were going to say it's position in the alphabet and I was trying

to figure out if that was true. So I was going through the whole alphabet song in my head. Yeah. I guess X is 24th out of 26. X is number 20. Yeah, yes, that's right. Yeah, okay. Because it's XYZ not QYZ. And Q is probably used more than X, more than Z and according to one study of another corpus of text, it's used more than J, but either way it's definitely toward the bottom. But not the bottom. People pretty much agree Z is the bottom. Zed, you mean? Also, we're doing a live episode in London.

And please come. I promise to use Zed unless I forget when we're there. I've been practicing. Aluminium. Water closet. Yeah, I'll back up the lorry of various words that we should remember. A lorry full. Car park, jelly deal. Right.

In America, we call that French fries. I don't know what the different name would be. Corn syrup. Corn syrup. Corn syrup. And that power ranking 24th out of 26, the source there is the book Language Visible, Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z. That's by classic scholar and University of Ottawa writing instructor David Sacks. And I also need to clarify that this David

Sacks is not the venture capitalist and Republican national convention speaker David Sacks. It's a different guy. Okay. There's more Sachs. There's more than one Sach out there. Yeah. If you try to Google David Sachs to check him out, you'll mostly get this tech vampire. This is a different guy. Sachs cites a few different rankings of the usage of Q. He found one list that puts it 23rd, but most lists puts it toward the bottom. And that gets us into one of the main questions about it. Why is it such a rare letter in English usage, which deserves a

mini takeaway number one. As Katie said, in English language writing, Q is often an over specialized and redundant version of K or C. Right. Yeah. I had never thought about it before researching. It's just like often a third version of C or K. And you would think our letters wouldn't stack up like that. Right. Because it's weird. Because it's not like it's for brevity, right? Because if you spelled Q without the U, right? Like if you could use the Q and not use the U, then great, you can skip a letter, right?

Because like KW creates that kwa sound. And we do use the kwa sound a lot in English. But then it's just QU. So, huh? Also long. It turns out the two main ways we use it are either to replace KW or to just replace K. The other English use of it is just straight up the K sound, and so it's even more redundant. We also could use it to replace see you.

Like it's never shorter or simpler. It's just another way. I'm trying to think of words that can't, where you can't use a K or a C. Quaga, no, you could use a KW. Quiet. I've run out of keywords. Yeah, and so has like everybody. It's fully redundant, other than I guess it's so specialized maybe it helps your reading comprehension. Like you know what's coming, but you pretty

much do with the other letters. It's a letter that I like, but it's a letter that if it disappeared tomorrow, we would get by. It's a letter that I like, but it's a letter that if it disappeared tomorrow, we would get by. It's fun. We could have a 25-letter alphabet. It's like an O with a little wink on it. It is, yeah. I could have said at the beginning, I do like it. It just doesn't come up a lot. It's partly because it's rare and redundant like this.

Yeah, it is ornamental, it feels. The sources for this takeaway are that David Sacks book and another book called Alphabetical, How Every Letter Tells a Story, and that's by BBC presenter Michael Rosen. I think we all have a general concept that the letters in the alphabet are all necessary. Otherwise, why do we have them? But many letters sort of share responsibilities with others. Like in the episode about why we talk about it, making sounds similar to I and to E and also to W in various cases. Probably the most famous overlap is C and K. Like on the CIF about

the name Katie, we talked about all those Catherine names using either one. It doesn't matter. Yeah. You can use C, you can use K, but you can't use Q, U. Quady. Quady. Feels fun to say. Feels fun to say. Oh no. Hi, Quady. Quady. Oh man. Now that I'm doing it, I'm starting to turn around on Q. Quady. Yeah. That felt pretty fun. That's fun. That puts a little bit of zhuzh on my name.

And I do understand that by beginning this process, it might escalate to qualics and I'm prepared for that. Qualics. I can handle it. I can take it. Now we're just quakas. Now we're just going to be quakas, which uses Q-U-O-K-K-A, which is fun because you have both Ks and Qs in there.

Wow. There are... Q has a really high batting average for fun animals, right? Yeah. Which is... Quacas and quacas and yeah, quetzals. It just seems random when it's used and not used because there's quaca, right? And then there's koala. What's going on here?

Yeah. We'll get into that because especially in English usage, we pretty much just use it two ways. And one of the ways comes from French. But the other way is that stack of- I should have guessed it's the French. I should have guessed it's the French. No offense to French people.

I have a French friend. Multiple. More than one French friend, actually. For an American, that's somewhat remarkable. Oh, our dislike of the French. Oh, we can't stand them. It's very strange. You know, actually, it's funny because when you're in Europe and you're an American, it is very much like French people and Americans team up against the English. And it's fun. I enjoy it.

We like to make fun of the English, which I do hate to say ahead of our very English performance coming up. So I should say I also have a British friend. I don't. We have at least two from the show. Let's learn everything. But otherwise, no, none. Forget it. Let's learn everything. But otherwise, no, none. Forget it.

That's right. I have two British friends. Starting with the not French way we use it in English is that QU function. I feel like that's well known. It's in words like quail, another fun animal, quest. Queen. Queen. It can also be in the middle of words like equilibrium. It's a very common sound that Q-U. And like Katie said, we could easily make it with a K-W. We could also make it with a C-W. Yeah. Like people would phonetically understand what you're doing. The Queen sent me on a quail quest to bring equilibrium to the Queen-queendom.

The Queen sent me on a quail quest to bring equilibrium to the Queen-queendom. Queendom? Queendom. Oh, I'm also thinking of our bonus show about cursive singing when we talked about Camila Cabello singing Quizmois. That's kind of a cue. Oh my God. Camila Cabello singing Quizmois. Now I can't stop.

Now I can't stop. Now I can't stop. You have become Quadey. It is complete. Quadey, yeah. Because this QU, English speakers across time have noticed its redundancy. My favorite disrespectful description of that is from Tudor England. Around 1600 AD, the English playwright Ben Johnson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, he described Q as a halting letter followed by her waiting woman, you. Which I assume had some like patriarchal stank of like ladies being waited on by ladies. It's not masculine, but like I will always think about that now

Q is a vain rapid Hololetter that likes to shop for shoes And we don't like it. It's very Q's be shoppin Q's that's why it's called QVC Q's, that's why it's called QVC. Oh. Q's be shoppin'. I mean, Q's be shoppin' is a really good slogan for QVC. That's great, actually.

Now, I'm also now thinking about Q from Star Trek, like shoppin' for all his props that he uses, cause he uses a lot of prop comedy in that show. He's such a prop guy, yeah, absolutely. And I know we think he just magics them up, but I think he actually probably has to shop for them ahead of time before he magics them up. Yeah, he stores up at Spirit Halloween like a squirrel storing nuts for winter. Yeah, he's got to buy all his little bits and bobs and his little japs to mess with

those space boys. Yeah, yeah. So that's one of the two English uses, the cue-you move. And our second common use is even more redundant because it happens in a lot of words brought into English from French. And the use is basically just cue as a K sound in the middle of words. One example is mannequin. Like mannequin could be spelled with a K in the middle. It would be fine.

Oh, yeah. Dang, that's got a Q in it. Yeah. Listen, I have my strengths and I have my weaknesses. Spelling is not so much my strength. Yeah, it's spelled with a Q-U-I-N on the end, but it's not doing that Q-U move in other... Kin. Huh. Right.

It's just a kin. Kin. Interesting. Yeah. Man, a kin. Man, I have never really thought about it, but you are correct. That's crazy. Other examples are the word antique.

Oh, right. Which is spelled Q-U-E, but it's just a K, like a hard K. Yeah. Again, we could spell that ant-antique. A-N-T-E-E-K. Done. Easy. Right. It would be more English and simpler. Yes. There's also, this is a very British episode, the British spelling of the word check, where it's C-H-E-Q-U-E. Oh, guys. The American spelling drops the Q and does a K.

Yeah. Look, because like the English, I know that you've got this rivalry with the French. You got to get rid of your cues then. We'll finally win the Hundred Years War, Britain says. France's number one export is cues. Yeah, like legitimately the Norman invasion of England exported a lot of cues to England along with the letter Y and some other changes because French words and a lot of French spellings came in. Back to more numbers.

The next numbers here are about that progression starting with at least 3000 years, possibly 4000 years. At least 3000, possibly 4000. That's how far back the letter Q dates in human writing and language. Whoa. Okay. Well. It's old. Yeah. I feel like there's a joke to be made about that guy who was making fun of it for

being a lady. Now it's an old lady. But honestly, I'm tired of the ageism, Alex. Old ladies be shopping and that's okay. Yeah, take that Ben Johnson. It's a date range because there's two possible origins of the letter Q. We have like a solid point where it started showing up, which is with the Phoenicians. Okay. Now there's the thing where it's the pH and it could just be an F. Yes. I'm finding a lot of redundancies.

I oddly really enjoyed this story because it helped me understand the Q situation because it comes from chaos. To get into that, we have another mini takeaway number two. another mini takeaway number two. The look and shape of the letter Q is either based on a ball of wool or a monkey. It's a symbolic depiction of one of those two things. I can see both of them actually. The lowercase Q is like a little brown monkey with a tail. And then the big Q is like a big fat monkey with its tail kind of curled under it. Yeah, especially the big Q is like a ball of wool too.

Like the one a cat plays with in a cartoon where there's just one thread coming out. Well, the big Q, and then you unravel it and it becomes the little Q. Yeah, yeah. And we think it's one of those two things because the Phoenicians either came up with Q or copied it from Egypt. That's the progression. I feel like that's probably the answer to why we have so many redundancies in the English language is that it is a Frankenstein of so many different languages over so many millennia. Strung together, MacGyvered together with toothpicks and old bubble gum language. Yeah, like each sentence we say today, somebody could transcribe it and then break down

the various word origins of each word in the sentence. And it would be a lot of different origins. It's thrilling to me that it's that weird. It's a true gumbo of a language. But Quambo. Quambo. Now I walked into that one. I don't want to sound ignorant, even though I am about to, but from what I know of ancient Egypt is that language was represented by hieroglyphics.

Was there an Egyptian language after hieroglyphics that used letters versus the older form? What order was that in? Were there letters first and then hieroglyphics? Were they at the same time? Did certain like letters come after hieroglyphics or was Q from some kind of like hieroglyph? That's a very good and not ignorant question. Okay. The Egyptians started with hieroglyphics and then later in history, kind of after this story, came up with other scripts that we call names like Demotic that were more of a simple and almost letter form kind of script.

But the ball of wool meaning of Q would be the original meaning if the Egyptians came up with it. One possible origin is that the shape of Q is inspired by a hieroglyphic of a ball of wool. Okay. Like pretty directly depicting a ball of wool. No wonder Egyptians love their cats. They just like, or at least the cats love the Egyptians. All that wool lying around.

All the first hieroglyphs are like good toys and litter. That one treat they really like, it's just really catering to cats. So the Egyptian hieroglyphs were one of the influences on a really landmark alphabet in world history, the Phoenician alphabet. And that alphabet had 22 letters, 19 of which are now in the Latin and English alphabet in some form. It was a massive influence on everything we write. It's in the past episodes about letters. And as of around 1000 BC, the Phoenicians had a letter that we would call the name quaff. The transliterated English spelling is Q-O-P-H and it's the originator of Q. And we think the Phoenician one was visually depicting a monkey and that that name quaff

matches the Phoenician word for a monkey. Were there a lot of monkeys there? I think there were some monkeys because they were especially in what's now sort of the Levant, like Israel, Lebanon, Syria, that area. Ah, okay, okay. Phoenicians were in North Africa as well. What became Carthage under Carthaginian Empire was Phoenician. Because there's old world monkeys or old world primates and new world primates. So these must have been based on some kind of old world primate. And then maybe they spread a bit just through trade where people trade in monkeys.

No but they, well maybe they trade a few, but they were definitely trading the alphabet. As we said on the letter X episode and letter Y episode, this Phoenician alphabet influenced several other languages and alphabets. So whether we get Q from a ball of wool or a monkey, it's from the Phoenicians and a lot of fun. And they lead us into a mega takeaway number three. English speakers use the letter Q because it leapfrogged from the Phoenicians to the Etruscans to the French to comedy. Whaaaaat?

There is a really chaotic 3,000 years of cultures either liking Q or not liking Q, and it consistently almost dropped out of the alphabet completely. But because of Fenicia and the Etruscans and the French, we have it today. And then it gained extra prominence in English speaking through comedy. Through comedy. Okay. So like what? Did Bill Burr do like a set on the letter Q and everyone's like, all right, we got to give it another chance. He really is down to earth, you know? Tells it like it is. I like the idea that Q is from the era when one spot on Johnny Carson makes you a world

famous stand-up comedian. Like's all it took. Yeah. Q got invited to the couch. It couldn't sit because of the tail. It uses a lot of physical comedy with its shape. We'll do the progression before that. We have this Q in the Phoenician alphabet. And it turns out Q was very important in that alphabet because their language had two pretty

separate sounds that they represented with what became Q and what became K. There was a Phoenician letter called Kaph, K-A-P-H. They get vocalized in different parts of the throat. David Sachs says, quaff was more of a sound with the tongue touching a different part of the roof of the mouth. So they were actually distinct in that language. So with quaff, the cube being based on like a monkey, was there something like some, the idea was that it was just fun to make it look like a monkey or did it come from like a word for monkey or like mean monkey at some point? for monkey or like mean monkey at some point. It's a little of a second thing.

Yeah, apparently a lot of letters have some roots in being a pictorial representation of something and then it progresses into just being a symbol for a sound. I see. So they already had sort of these sounds and then they're like, let's give it a name and let's give it a symbol. Yeah. Okay. So like use quaff versus calf in a sentence.

I'm just tormenting Alex. And this language and alphabet was massively influential. It's not spoken anymore today, but we often describe it as a Canaanite language or a Semitic language. And It massively influenced three languages with big significance today. It was foundational to Hebrew. It was foundational to Arabic. Both those languages and character systems retained a lot of the difference between Q and K. That's part of why there's a lot of things that start with Q in Arabic. It just comes up a lot. But the other thing it influenced and influenced differently is Greek. Oh, okay.

The Greeks took it on and also decided Q was redundant and they didn't need it. Yeah, that's really interesting. Also, I thought like in modern Arabic, Q does not have like, it has a slightly different pronunciation than it does in English. It does, yeah. And it's partly because they, in a way I can't really describe because I don't speak either language, but they retain some of that Phoenician way of pronouncing it. And so there is still more of a distinction. So that's why it's so common. It's like a much more useful letter in Arabic than English. Okay. So now you have the Phoenician alphabet and the Phoenician language has basically spawned

or greatly inspired Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek. And then the Greeks were like, we don't need this weird shaped monkey letter. Get rid of it. Yeah. Because the Greeks used the Phoenician alphabet in a much, I guess you could call it less respectful way toward the Phoenician language. The Greeks said, we have an amazing Greek spoken language. We're going to change a bunch of these letter shapes to mean Greek sounds.

We'll just exploit these great shapes and use them to say Greek. And so they created a Greek letter K, which is called Kappa, and they created a Greek letter Q called Kwapa. Kwapa. Pretty rapidly, they decided Kwapa doesn't make any Greek sounds and they dropped it. Yeah. So that's why you don't see it in like fraternity names or whatever. It's not in there. Now, I was in QWAPA Phi Beta. So, you know, go QWAPAs. I was in TriQWAP. It was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. QWAP it up, boys or girls. I don't know.

So this is a weird progression because the Phoenicians gave to the Greeks and the Greeks decided it was not useful. But in between trying it and deciding they didn't need it, they spread it. And one group they spread it to is the Etruscans. Because the Greeks were like the Phoenicians trading all over the Mediterranean. They also colonized a lot of what's now Sicily and southern Italy. And so they met a culture in central Italy called the Etruscans. Right. I always think there's like a part of the year that's called like the Etruscan Canal, but I think it's actually a different word, like the Eustachian Canal or the Eustachian tube. I don't actually know how it's pronounced,

but I was like, yeah, the Etruscan Canal of the ear, but I think that is actually a geographical location and I'm getting it confused. The Etruscans are a meme for fans of the TV show Jeopardy because they've done categories about a Treskin stuff called those darn Treskens because they're kind of obscure and frustrating to think about as a trivia fan. Oh, Alex, I now do this thing on planes where I watch Jeopardy when they have it on there, which it's like the perfect plane show for me. It keeps my attention just enough.

I'm really bad at it. I don't know if you know anything about Jeopardy Alex. It doesn't seem like you would know that much about the show. And you certainly wouldn't have been on it like what? Three times in a row? More. Wait, no, how long was your streak?

I won four times. So I was on five games. My gosh. Oh my God. That's so cool. Yeah, whole week. Yeah. Because for me, if there's a subject that I know, which is basically just biology, that's

it. That's the only category I'm good at. And I'm like, man, like the Etruscans did, had king flupity boopity and which of these famous wars they had with the more blobs. And it's like, excuse me, squeeze me. Yeah, that's how everybody feels about them. And the weird thing is like the Phoenicians give their letters to the Greeks starting around 800 BC and the Greeks bring that to the Etruscans as soon as 700 BC and before they finish dropping Quapa because they don't need

it. And so the Etruscans pick up a still with Quapa version of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet and the Etruscans use Quapa. They're like, great, Quapa version of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet. And the Etruscans use Quapa. They're like, great, Quapa is a letter that we can use for the Qu sound that will be in the future. Quapa, Quapa, Quapa, Quapa, big Quapa energy. I'm a big fan of Quapa. Huge Quapa energy. Huge quapa energy. Yeah, it is an interesting, like the Greeks tried really hard to get rid of the Q, but it just wouldn't die. It's too fun. It's too fun of a letter.

Right. And I really like that Q went from Phoenicia to Etruscans through a culture with no interest in it. It's really fun to me. Right. They're like, this is garbage. And the Etruscans are like, now hold on. Now, wait a minute. So why do you think the Etruscans used it versus the Greeks? Is there any clear kind of reason other than like big quokka, big quokka energy where it just became kind of popular? It's a reason I can say but cannot describe because it's just that the existing Etruscan language had a lot of words that could use that sound. Okay.

The same way I can say the Phoenicians did and the Greeks didn't, it's all languages I don't speak, but that's why. Right. It's all Phoenician to you. Then we have another flip into a next culture takes it that doesn't really want it because the main fame of the Etruscans in history is that they got conquered and taken over by what started out as a small city called Rome. Oh yeah. And then became a republic and an empire. A little provincial town.

Yeah. That little guy. That little guy in his toga, little Caesar. And the Romans had a very English language attitude toward Q. They picked it up from the Etruscans and they did include it in their alphabet even though it didn't fit very many Latin words. The Romans had a different language called Latin. But then they ended up using it in a kind of redundant way for a lot of Latin words because of Etruscan influence. Very much based on Latin. I'm trying to think of a single Italian word that's not just imported

from France that uses Q. My Italian vocabulary is limited, because France and Italy are very geographically close. There are places like bordering towns, stones toss away, but actually you have these very regional languages. There's a Piemontese language that is much more French and the pronunciations are different. There are all these regional accents. And then when Italy was unified, it used to be a bunch of different nations, states, and then it was unified in the 1800s. And there was this push, like, we all need to speak one type of Italian guys, just one, just pick one. And that's still like only, like even today, even though most Italians do speak the one main official Italian language. There's definitely still accents and local languages.

And then Italians will tell me, yeah, I cannot understand people from this region because they're basically speaking a different dialect or a different language. That's the next step is the Latin speakers used it but didn't necessarily need it. So then some romance languages like Italian de-emphasized it, but other romance languages like French and Spanish kept it up. It's all over Spanish. Like you say, France and Italy are close together. One ran with Q, the other didn't.

Mainly because the Romans are like us. They had Q, they weren't that into it. There's even a very fun quote where a Roman writer says the letter Q is, quote, redundant except for the purpose of attaching vowels to itself. And this writer was named Quintilian. His name starts with Q and he was like, why Q? And I'm not into it. I mean, to be fair, he didn't name himself, did he? No, he did not. That's true.

So, you know, it's like, it's not really hypocritical because he wasn't like a little baby and saying like, I want to be named Quintillium or whatever you said his name was. Quintillian, yeah. Yeah, no baby pops out going like, I am Quintillian. Yeah, and like one of the most common Roman given names was Quintus. They had the political office of Quasters, the grammatical article Quae.

The number five is Quinquae. Like the Q was all over the language, but in the redundant way, English uses it for the most part. Oh, Cinque I think has a Q in it. Oh, in Italian? Yeah, probably. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so there you go.

That Latin numbering system. Yeah, and then the next step to get it into English is the French, because before Normans invaded England and after the Roman Empire fell, people in what's now England really, really dropped Q. They didn't have enough Roman influence to force it to stay in the alphabet. What we often call Anglo-Saxon Britain, where a lot of Germanic peoples had come in and some Scandinavians had come in, they had an old version of English with no letter Q. So they had spellings where

they had the word queen, but it was spelled C-W-E-N. Queen C-W-E-N. I love it. Yeah. You know what, Alex? Did I ever tell you that I accidentally took a class in college where I learned a little bit of Middle English? No. Cool. It was just like, well, just say it. Because you look at this thing on the page and you have no idea what's going on. It's like, well, just say it out loud. You're like, quick?

Oh, right. Okay. Is that Q redundancy? We really can work around it. It's not hard. No. We could still dump it, except that I'm, if we renamed Q Quappa, I'd be much more on board. Those are the leaps. The Phoenicians, disinterested Greeks, interested Etruscans, kind of disinterested

Romans, interested French is how Q stuck around. And then it also was in kind of that Roman style where it's definitely in our alphabet, but very rare. And so then people started using Q for its rarity and one way was in comedy. Hmm. You mean comity? Like, especially in the late 1800s, comedy writers started saying, if you put Q in somebody's name it indicates they're wacky or weird. Like, we still to this day have people throw a middle initial Q into a name for goofs. Like, it means something's goofy.

This sounds like that King of the Hill episode where Bobby is talking about comedy and like teaching that like the letter K, the consonant K is an inherently funny letter and you want to use it a lot in comedy. Right, that too. Yeah, which you know. It's a comedy K. It's comedy K and I have a lot of consonants in my name so I guess I'm just inherently funny and that's why people laugh at me.

But yeah, so cute. I can see it, right? Quincy, that's fun. That's a funny name. John Quincy Adams. Right, John Quincy Adams, funny president. He was shortening out of Q. Yeah. Oh, really?

You're going to be President John Quincy Adams? Yeah. And another example changed our word for something. One of the French-ish examples of using Q is the word milk toast. Until the early 1900s, English speakers spelled that without a Q. They spelled it the word milk and the word toast. Right, which makes sense. And it was also a food that is that. Yeah, because it's milk and then it's toast. Right, and so the spelling M-I-L-Q-U-E, toast, comes from a comic strip

in the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. Strip was from 1924 to 1953. So in relatively modern times, this cartoon added a meek and submissive character named Caspar Milktoast, and they spelled it with a Q to increase his meekness, submissiveness, comedicness. And that changed how Americans spell this food and idea. That's actually really funny. Comedy letter. Yeah.

Well, you know what? I guess we've been doing that for a while, right? Where we just change out the letters of things to make them funnier. People do it online now. You take a word, you change some of the letters around to make it sound either fancier or less fancy. That's comedy, folks. Right. Just letter changes. Cheeseburger cats have been around a while and they're not ever going away. They're always

going to be funny. Yeah. This was partly powered by the rarity of Q in regular words. People said, oh, I can pick it up for comedy now. That also played into a partly tragic thing where the letter Q got used for homophobic comedy. Oh, I see. Interesting. Because it's associated with the word queer and also characters would be given the Q middle

name or whatever as part of a joke about they're also flamboyant and isn't that funny, you know? And the word queer has been reclaimed to some extent in the modern day, but that's one element of this letter being a LGBTQ thing. Like it's very prominent in that. Right, right, right. LGBTQ thing. It's very prominent in that. Right, right, right. Partly from its rarity in the language. I guess that is one good point though. LGBTQ sounds worse than LGBTQ.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Kevin? It's not the same. Just Kevin. He's cool though. He's cool though. Kyle? Kyle is also welcome. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, that is, that's too bad because I'm of course joking about the letter

Q, but it is kind of like sadly revealing that we will use anything to like dunk on people who are a little different from us. It's like, oh, you know, you like, you fell in love with someone that I wouldn't fall in love with. Well, you're more like this letter, right? This letter, huh? Yeah. It's pretty silly. Yeah, it's weird. And then the other modern use of its rarity is a more positive one in science and technology. Because with Q being so rare, it got picked up for words like quark and quasar and other relatively new words just because those are new scientific

concepts. That is another cube-themed character in Star Trek, Quark. Quark? Right, Quark. Bartender, yeah. Yeah. Q was sort of laying around to some extent. And so when people found new modern scientific things, they've often used it for that name.

It does sound kind of futurey. Yeah, it's sort of like the letter X in that way where like planet X is mysterious. We've used Q that way too. Apparently there was an infectious bacterial disease that scientists figured out in the 1930s, but before they knew how it worked or where it came from, they called it Q fever. With Q meaning it's strange. I don't understand this disease yet. What's going on? Okay. But when you say Q fever, it does actually sound like a good thing to me. I don't know why, but it sounds like I've got Q fever and it just means that you're really good at dancing

or playing ping pongpong or something. I don't know. It's just like, yeah, man, I've got the Q fever because I'm so cool. I'm so cool. Yeah, it's true. Another use of it as mysterious is that in the 20th century, the US government added a classification of security clearance above top secret and they called it Q clearance because that letter was kind of around and exciting sounding. Top secret.

And that's the name origin of the Q Anon conspiracy theory. Oh, okay. A story that someone had Q clearance and leaked a bunch of stuff. It's all fake, but that's why that's named that at all. Yeah, maybe that's why I have that initial negative reaction to cue is the cue stuff because I'm tired of it, man. Yeah, it's really bad. Conspiracy theories can be fun. And I like it when they involve things like Bigfoot and space aliens or big feet in space. When it's just like, when it just kind of foments this like, I don't know, just

like, man, the deep state brother. It's like, okay, I don't know. It's boring. Yeah. And I'm glad Q has primarily just been used for interesting things and not this Trump thing because there's also a British security and military thing. In World War I, they created the term Q ships to describe disguised combat ships that they used to lure German U-boat submarines out into the open. I see. So, were they also behind Q tips where they're disguised as things you stick in your ear, but you're really not supposed to do that because then you can puncture your eardrum

and then they gave them to the Germans and the Germans were like, look at this good ear cleaning thing. Oh, my eardrum is ruptured. I was fooled by this shape and design of this thing. We'll talk about Q-tips in the bonus. It's fun. What? Yeah.

Alex, I didn't read your email, so I didn't know that. I didn't tell you. Yeah, so that's good. Yeah, yeah. So then I did read your email. Yeah, and the Q-ships, they were built to look like unarmed merchant vessels, so then the submarine would surface and try to get it to surrender, and then they would reveal their guns and blow up the submarine.

It was a good trick. The thing is, it's a good trick. This was in World War II? One. One? Okay. It does seem like disguising your ship as a merchant ship, because then you're just training the enemy to shoot first, ask questions later.

So cool trick, but hmm. Possibly. This Q-term, it continued to be a letter to signify interesting and clever designs and devices in British military insecurity. And that led to the name of the character Q in the James Bond franchise. Oh, okay. So that's why he has that letter. I thought his name was Q just because he's a cutie. Look at him with his little gadgets.

Oh, his little gizmos. The secondary influence might be that going even back to the novels, Q's scenes are always funny in Bond. Like it's always like, oh, behave 007. And like it fits the positive comedy meaning of Q, like goofs and bits. He's adorable. He's like a fun little guns butler. Look, look here Bond. Here's um, it's like it's a gun, but it's

in the shape of a penny. Um, now it's mingled among these real pennies and I'm sort of lost track. The name, the name Q also comes from calling him a quartermaster, but I really wish they called him a guns butler. That's perfect. Yeah. And so that's why Q is here to stay at English. It's really, really found a bunch of organic English uses beyond the linguistic influences. But also it still is very rare. And very last number to round off this mega takeaway, the number is one out of 200.

Because there is just one letter Q in all of the top 200 US baby names of the past century. Whoa. None of them start with Q. And when you look at the list, there is only one letter Q in all of the 200 names at all. It's still just very rare in our culture and in the way we use it, even though it's all over. Yeah. I keep thinking of Quincy.

I can't actually think of another Q name. I'm sure they exist. Angelique, but that's French. Like Quentin and Quinn are big ones. Okay, yeah. Quinn, Quentin. And that's kind of rising. But the Social Security Administration says that- Quentin's rising. The Social Security Administration says from 1924 to 2023, none of the top 100 boy names or girl

names start with Q. And girl name number 68 is Jacqueline, which has one Q in the middle. That's the only Q on the entire list of 200 names. If you have a Q in your name, that's really neat. It's really rare. There are qua sounds in names, but certainly not like names that start with Q. I cannot think of really. I can think of a lot of names that involve the qua sound within them. Yeah. And they're at least across the past century, relatively uncommon. They're not in the top 100 for either of those binary genders. That was a humongous amount of takeaways and numbers. We're going to return with one more takeaway to round off the main show about another huge

proliferation of Q. We got to get Q fever going here, Alex. Got a fever that can only be quenched by more Q facts. By more Qowbell? Yeah, that's right. By more Qao Bell. Folks, as you know, support for this podcast comes from donors. People who donate through MaximumFun.org are the only reason that's secretly incredibly fascinating is a podcast at all.

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Same bat time, same bat channel. I see what you did there. Folks, we are back and with one astounding last takeaway because takeaway number four. takeaway number four. The Latin alphabet letter Q is one of the most popular and wide ranging Chinese characters. Oh, I didn't know that. The letter Q that I'm familiar with from speaking English is its own character in modern Chinese across a few different languages and in the character system. No other English letter is really like that. Does it look like the English Q or does it just sound like the English Q?

Looks like it too. Yeah, they're drawing a Q exactly the way a Latin alphabet person would do it. Oh, so it's a Q. It looks and sounds like the English Q? Yeah, it has been brought in for a lot of different reasons. Is it to import new words, like new spellings of new words that are imports, or are they replacing older characters with the new cue character? It's to bring in a new concept in a few different ways. Hmm.

Concept? Okay. And they're expressing it through basically a lone word, which is really just the letter. They have consciously borrowed it from the Latin alphabet and the rest of the world. Okay. So then in what context is this used? It's for just new letters or new words? Key source here is an amazing New York Times piece by Amy Chen.

One big one is as a descriptor of food. The letter Q means a chewy and bouncy and special texture in food, especially in Taiwan. And then that's spread across sort of the whole Han Chinese world. Oh, wow. The word for this is just the character, which is Q. So if you're describing it like you were saying a chewy kind of food, you would say, you know, I do not speak a word of Mandarin, but like you'd say, you know, the phrase and then this food is like Q.

Exactly. Like, yeah, the phrasing would be sort of like calling something al dente. Right. It's like saying this bubble tea, tapioca, these noodles, these fish balls, they are Q. They have Q. Ah, that's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. They are Q. They have Q. Ah, that's really interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. And you know what? There are not enough words for mouthfeel, which I feel very strongly about. I'm very, very sensitive to food textures. Some textures I can't deal with, and then a lot of textures I like, but I'm also just noticing them a lot, like notice food textures a lot. And I am often lacking in the words to describe, like when people are saying like, well, wait, so you don't like this food versus this food, why is that? It's like, well, I don't know, one is like shplong,

and the other one is like shplong. I don't know how to explain it. We don't have the words for it. Yeah, yeah, this also has an unclear origin. It might relate to a word in Taiwanese local version of the Hokkien dialect, which is similar to the sound of the English letter Q. That's the closest we are to a theory about why this just got brought in. The real reason we really know is simply that thing. We don't have enough words and characters for food textures. We're kind of developing some of that recently. So they grabbed the letter Q from the Latin alphabet.

You say recently, like how recent? It's the last hundred plus years. There's not an exact date either. There's not one corner of this or anything. Yeah. No, I like that though because yeah, I want more words for textures, even for flavors, right? I feel like our food words are too limited. Yeah. And this one gets used pretty widely and could probably even be broken down more.

Like apparently it applies to savory foods and sweet foods and to a huge range of kinds of foods. They've also described Korean rice cakes as Q, Japanese mochi as Q, certain kinds of Italian pastas, most kinds of gummy bear candies. It's a springy elastic softness is what Q is in especially Taiwan, but also mainland China and elsewhere. Sorry, because I'm probably not pronouncing this right, but there is a food that I've had. It's like a Korean food, I think called like Boki.

Boki. Yeah. That's what I meant to describe as the Korean food. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. That is Kew. It is Kew. Which is okay. But this is the thing is like, I don't like mochi, It is Q. Which is okay, but this is the thing is like I don't like mochi, that chewiness, but I like the bokeh chewiness of like the pasta or not the pot, but those rice noodles, but I don't like the... Oh, okay.

Mochi has a different, slightly different chewiness. So we need like more words for different gradients of types of chewiness. I'm going to die on this hill and Great news. They have developed one thing beyond just Q which is to call foods QQ, which means extra chewy Whoa? Hey and this New York Times piece a link It's got a lot of like market signs in Taipei where it's a lot of Chinese characters and also the letter Q all over it Because that's the signifier of this quality achieved in food. I'm okay. I'm with it. I'm with it on the Q. I'm with it on the Q scale of chewiness. Keep adding Qs for being more chewy,

less Qs for less chewy. Then also there's lots of other meanings of the letter Q in sort of the way that most Chinese characters have many meanings in different contexts. Another one in both Taiwanese Hokkien and also in Cantonese is that the letter Q is a signifier of cuteness. It might partly be because of the letter sounding like the English word cute, but that's a modern development.

It's become a symbol of that. Okay. So like you put like it just the letter Q means something's cute? Yeah. Like you'd put it in front of the regular Chinese characters for the thing you're describing, whether you're writing or speaking. I see. That's, I do like that. It is, now I'm thinking of how the origin of the letter was supposed to look like a little monkey and that is pretty cute. Wow. Yeah. It fits.

It fits the Phoenician even though that's probably an accident. There's just a vibe there. Yeah. As long as you think monkeys are cute, which I do. Same. Yeah, same. And yeah, and then Q also entered the lexicon in at least two other unrelated ways. One is a major work of modern Chinese literature. There was a movement starting in 1919 called

the May Fourth Movement, which encouraged a strong sense of Chinese nationalism and also adopting Western ideas whenever that could help make China a stronger country. And one writer in that movement called Liu Xun published a novel in the 1920s called The True Story of Ah Q. And the last name is the Latin letter Q. The cover of it is all Chinese characters and the letter Q, if it's written in Chinese. So this was like a name, Ah Q is the name of the protagonist? Yeah. And at the beginning, he says that he went with the letter Q as part of the name because he couldn't remember the character's whole name, the narrator claims. And it becomes a way of like, anonymizing this character. Apparently the novel's relatively comedic,

and also that use of the letter Q might be a pun on the English name for a long man chew hair braid that's called a Q, spelled Q-U-E-U-E in English. I see. So this popular novella that was part of a modernist and nationalist movement really promoted one English letter and not the others. It pushed the letter Q.

I guess when you're picking English letters that have a really unique shape and sound, Q, and I guess X and Z are also up there with just being little weirdos that are kind of fun and interesting. And also like Q has a longer sound than a lot of letters. Like T is really short, B really short, but Q you can really draw that out more, which might make it more self-sufficient as like just a single letter. I don't know if that makes any sense.

I'm not a linguist. I really can see how in languages like Mandarin and Cantonese, where each character has a whole name and means so much, how they turned the Latin letter Q into one of those. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And another modern trend that brought it in originally came from Israel and from the English language. Internet developers created a 1990s chat service called ICQ in Israel. Oh, right. And it got elsewhere too. It's a sort of a

play on the English words, I seek you. So they use the acronym letter I, letter C, letter Q. And that led to a popular Chinese chat service run by Tencent that they just named QQ. And it racked up more than a hundred million users and made the letter very prominent that way. QQ is a fun, I like saying that. So- It feels great, yeah. It does feel good. It also looked like when you put like two lowercase Qs

together or two uppercase Qs, I don't know, it makes it look like it has a little face or something. I don't know. Yeah. The circles for eyes and then the lines create sort of some structure to the face. I don't know It's it's nice looking is what I'm saying It is yeah, they're like the mouth feel sort of like the food texture. It's very nice Yeah, and that's also part of why the the other other other big use of it in modern China is

and modern slang and Cantonese and in a vulgar way. Uh-oh. That I think I can describe with minimal bleeping. Apparently Cantonese speakers- Bad word alert, bad word alert. Eew, eew, eew. According to Professor Victor Mayer, a professor of Chinese language at the University of Pennsylvania, he says

that Cantonese speakers will use the letter Q sort of like the curse word that starts with F in English when we just use it for emphasis. Like if we say something as f***ing blah blah blah, like not a sexual thing, like they'll just put Q on the front of something they want to put emphasis on in a way that is considered vulgar and impolite. So it's there. I can't believe you did that. They would say like, I can't believe you Q did that. That's adorable. Yeah, I'm going to start doing that. Just like, man, this water is so Q fresh. There are so many uses of Q in actual Chinese that according to Victor Mayer, it is for

practical purposes, its own standalone Chinese character in a different way from the Latin letter use of it. And then on top of that, when we write Chinese words into English phonetically and write it into the Latin alphabet, we often use the letter Q for not the English sound, if that makes sense, like a CH sound. It's a system called Pinyin that was developed and adopted in the 1950s. We could have just used the Latin letter CH for the sound we think of as ch, but they wanted just one letter for it and because our letter Q was kind of laying around.

Just laying around. We got all these extra Qs in our warehouse, in our letters warehouse. Yeah, and so when you see transliterated Chinese words, they're not using Q as the Chinese character and they're not using Q as the English sound. They're using Q as a CH sound, which is a whole nother borrowing of Q because it's just kinda sitting there in English.

English frustrates me because I still feel like when we sort of like Englishify languages that don't use that alphabet, it does get, I don't know that we do a great job of it and it gets confusing. Yeah, we pretty much do it wrong or do it confusingly. So like when people see the name of the Qin dynasty, but it's spelled Q-I-N, a lot of English speakers mangle that because they're trying to use Q the way it's used in English, but they don't realize that it's being used as a different character in a Latin alphabet version of Chinese. Yeah.

Yeah. And they're trying to capture sounds in Mandarin and Cantonese that are not quite in English, but they went away that is somewhat specifically confusing and has stuck around. Classic English move. Alphabets are sort of in a battle with how we talk and the differences of cultures all of the time. And Q is a weird letter for that, across the board. Yeah, they're also in soups. How many Qs, I hope we've got some stats on this, like how many Qs do they put in alphabet soup? Cause I know they don't put a lot of them in Scrabble

and it's worth a lot. So like how much Qs do they make in alphabet soup, Alex? I think I- Or what? Did you not research this episode thoroughly? I think I haven't thought about alphabet soup since the last time I ate it, potentially like 30 years ago. Time. I don't like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it.

I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it.

I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it.

I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one. In English language writing,

Q is often an over-specialized and redundant version of K or C. Takeaway number two. The look and shape of the letter Q either developed from a drawing of a ball of wool or a drawing of a monkey. Mega takeaway number three. English speakers use the letter Q because it leapfrogged from the Phoenicians to the Etruscans to the French to comedy and rarity. And takeaway number four, the Latin alphabet letter Q is one of the most popular and wide

ranging Chinese characters. Those are the takeaways. Also I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the confusing queue names of Muammar Gaddafi and Q-Tips. Both things separately.

Visit sif.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 17 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book Language Vis, Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z, that is by classic scholar and University of Ottawa writing instructor, David Sacks. Another book called, Alphabetical,

How Every Letter Tells a Story, by BBC presenter and children's author, Michael Rosen. And then further expertise from Victor Mayer, professor of Chinese language at the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University's Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and New York Times and Washington Post journalism about the letter Q today. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people

and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also KD taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free CIF discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord and hey would you like a tip on another

episode? Great because each week I'm finding something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 137. That's about the topic of pickles, as in pickled cucumbers specifically. Fun fact there, the pickled cucumber and the regular cucumber have totally different origins in the world. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshaven by the BUDOS band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Music Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.