G WHIZ


In some ways, G it is a forgotten letter. 
We just don’t think about it much. 
After all, it is not the first or the last in the abcdery, is neither the loveliest nor most dramatic, and is not the dullest or least appealing either.  It is only the 16th most used letter in common writing.  In other words...it is neither here nor there.  It just kind of sits there in the 7th position, a graceful curve between the two angular forms of F and H.  Sturdy, noble, poised.  Reliable.
But it is a grand letter too, if only because we could not have the word grand without it.  Not to mention great, or good, or even generic.  So let us take a moment to praise the letter G.

If you google G, which you can only do by using it, you get 3 billion hits and that must say something.  Like most of its fellow letters, you can follow the evolution of the G in a neat counter-clockwise arc (like the letter G, come to think of it) around the Mediterranean.  Starting in Egypt 5,000 years ago where some scholars relate it to a hieroglyph that represented a boomerang.  Then moving up to Ancient Phoenicia where it began to look like a bent angle.  By 600 BCE the Greeks wrote it as a right-facing right angle and called it gamma.  It was the third letter of their alphabet.  The Romans by the 2nd century gave the letter its current form as an arc with a foot. 

An alternative history says that G really derives from Z, the first letter of the word zayin which in Hebrew means “weapon” or “ornament.”  According to this tale, Z was the original 7th letter but was purged from the Latin alphabet in the 3rd century BCE by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign. 
History is fun but it is good to remember that in alphabetics, form follows sound and writing is above all an attempt to render speech into pictures.  It is here that G really comes into its own thanks to its versatility.  G is a linguistic Leonardo.  It can be hard like the G in gun, goose, and game; softer like the G in ginger, giant, geology; or really soft like the G in rouge, beige, and genre.  When it is followed by an H, it can sound like an ocean wave as in rough or, on the other hand, be utterly silent as in high.

Like the other letters, we also use G as a stand-in and here too it is both approachable and flexible.  G means good on a report card but not great.  G means gravity in physics but not grandeur.  G refers to German in dictionaries but not germaine.  Gulf in geography but not gorge.  A gram of weight but not a pound of cure.  A grand but no fortune.  A tone but not a sonata.  A guinea but no gold.  G as in government spending, conductance, the fifth note of C Major.  You see what we mean? 
Not majestic, just reliable. 
In lower case, with a playful tail, G can get a bit wild and crazy graphically but it is still suitable for all audiences, never risqué.   Oh sure the alphabet needs its As and Zs, must mind its Ps and Qs, and W is always there for fun. 
But let us honor the letter G for the moment...genuine, genteel, gracious, good-natured.  Our writing needs all that too, doesn’t it.  Golly G, of course it does.






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