Please note this is an extract from my book ‘The Alternative Wordbook’ which features my original attempts at new words, tied together within a weird and subtle meta-narrative amongst the definitions (not very important). I’ll be sharing the chapters of the book, including essays on every letter in the alphabet, in consumable chunks or ‘chapters’ throughout the months and weeks that follow this, while I busy myself working on the next book which I definitely won’t be giving away for free eventually one day
The letter “e” is one of the most interesting of all the letters. As one of the simplest letters in the alphabet, its history dates back many years, when it was forged into a kind of everyman’s letter by early philosophers working with deadly hot ink. Since then it has been gleefully employed whenever and wherever anyone wants to, becoming the letter of everything, everyone and most importantly of all, the letter of equality. And what’s more, you don’t have to be stingy, as it can be used for freeeeee.
Its use throughout history is more complex. The letter fell out of favour in the early medieval period, as religious organizations attempted to stamp out its use, seeking to put an increasingly cynical generation of plebeians and peasants in their place, i.e. under them. Until this time, serfs had been accustomed to using the letter on a whim, and in many cases even for explicit behaviour. To combat this, clergymen encouraged the use of the word “evil”, which was eventually bandied about like nobody’s business, resulting in whole generations scared to contemplate “e” thanks to its new, perceived connection with evil. It is worth noting that at this time, the business of spreading vocabulary for a fee was run by the Nobodys (a family clan that few remember thanks to an event in the late seventeenth century when Nobody after Nobody was silenced, killed and harvested for reasons Nobody’s couldn’t fathom).
In the eighteenth century, rationalist thinkers attempted to rescue this abandoned class of illiterates, heralding the return of an emancipatory letter and placing it firmly at the front of their banner for their movement: enlightenment. Spearheading the group was David Hume, the doubting philosopher, who saw to it that everything that could be questioned was questioned and questioned again. His intellectual height, it was said, towered twice above any other, and his pockets were twice as deep still – which was important, as his tasks were so momentous they required twice the length of pencil. Next to him was Adam Smith, a mathematician and the father of Economics. His son, Economics, later changed his name to Tom.
Finally, there was Robert McElrington, an ordinary boy who joined the group after being bitten by a radioactive spider scientist, and found himself transformed into what many at the time believed to be a superhero. Almost instantly hair grew on his arms, his voice grew deeper, and a lump lodged in his throat, while elsewhere his testicles fell slightly, to hang below a penis which grew to the size of a spider. From that day (around his 13th birthday) he vowed to find a cure for rabies (as he had contracted rabies). Today however, we better know McElrington as the inventor of electricity, discovered when he got drunk and pissed into a toaster. In this historic enlightenment gesture of experimentation, he, alas, expired a genius. At the turn of the nineteenth century, pioneers building on this movement of free and radication thinkers started to employ the letter in pairs as confidence in “e” returned. They excelled themselves when steel was born, and built buildings taller than the sun. Beer was put into mass production, marketed as a cure for being unhappy and unattractive. The invention of beer revolutionised the public house industry, which had until then simply housed parched men sat at tables out-bullshitting for no purpose, and with increasing annoyance for all concerned, with nothing else to do with themselves. Our relationship to bees was changed as well, after they were uncovered living in trees; before anyone had the audacity to climb trees, bees had been harvested for bee juice by catching and squeezing their abdomens and sucking on their sticky poison. Now, people could steal their honey, and everyone was happy (except the bees).
In the modern era, the letter “e” has found a different kind of popularity. In the 1990s a cheeky chemist, with an enlightened attitude and an enthusiasm for linguistics, created a new drug called “Ecstasy” that tried to epitomise the joy and freedom of the letter “e”. Originally, the pills were hand-painted with the letter on their back, but thanks to the commercial success of these small white charms, they are now mass produced, with whole teams of underpaid staff spraying on the letter “e”, sometimes at a rate of 7 or 8 pills at a time. Recent government reports into the drug have suggested that the widespread availability of Ecstasy in dancing pharmaceuticals and travelling post offices can account for a 95% drop in sadness with a similar percentage of beats-dropping too. Today, it is passed around as an anti-aphrodisiac, for those whose genitals are simply too hard for sex.
