On “the preeminence of ABC.” From Judith Flanders’s A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (New York: Basic Books, 2020):
It is an unspoken assumption of alphabetic writing systems that the alphabet is primary. Letters near the beginning of the alphabet are somehow superior to those that follow: alpha males dominate romantic fiction; in the 1950s, B-movies followed or preceded the main feature; in the 1960s the B-side of records carried the songs that were not expected to be hits. The preeminence of ABC over, say, DEF, or LMN, runs unconsciously through every part of the world that uses an alphabet, and some regions that do not: there have been broadcasting companies named ABC in the USA, Australia, Britain, the Philippines, and even in Japan, a nonalphabet country; it is also the title of a Swedish news program, a Spanish newspaper, and several food companies and cinema chains across the globe. As well as an Arab Banking Corporation in alphabetic Bahrain, there is an Agricultural Bank of China in decidedly nonalphabetic China. ABC is a programming language, and a streaming algorithm. English-speakers learning first aid are reminded to check ABCs (airways, breathing, circulation). Mathematics has an abc conjecture, an ABC formula, and Approximate Bayesian Computation. The Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof Islands off the coast of Alaska are known as the ABC Islands; their counterparts in the Lesser Antilles are Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.I’m still in the preface and already learning things.
