Alphabetization, says Patricia Crain in her excellent The Story of A (Stanford UP. 2000), denotes “the constellation of activities and practices—often amounting to rites and rituals, both individual and institutional—that surrounds the learning and teaching of the alphabet” (7). The term was popularized by Friedrich Kittler in his monumental Discourse Networks 1800/1900, and has recently been mined for new work by Crain, Lisa Gitelman, and other scholars of media and inscription who I’ve been reading. So you can imagine my inerest to find this bit of coverage of the California recall, which informs us that “alphabetical order” is not, in fact, a fair or adequate heuristic for listing candidates’ names on the ballot. Today in Sacramento a lottery was held to determine the order randomly: R, W, Q, O, J, M, V, A, H, B, S, G, Z, X, N, T, C, I, E, K, U, P, D, Y, F and L.
This is SOP, for CA elections anyway.
Seem silly? It’s not according to election officials, who claim that the lucky candidate can expect a 5% bounce from being listed first. In any case, this instance of de-alphabetization defamiliarizes the ABCs enough to remind us that the standard sequence is indeed an instance of artifice, held together by (no more and no less than) collective custom and convention.
Posted by mgk at August 11, 2003 08:45 PMAs someone whose last name appears near the end of alphabetical lists, I've often contemplated this problem and noted the arbitrary order of letters (being at the end of roll sheets in school often forced me to do certain activities last). There's definitely a certain type of logic there.
Yeah, I'm always at the end, too, so I rather like this idea. Just seeing the alphabet backwards is really weird, too - like here, for instance: http://nickm.com/ - I ended up just staring at that backwards alphabet for ages the other day when I realised what it was. So perfect, and yet so - backwards.
Posted by: Jill at August 12, 2003 04:27 AM | Link to Comment