SPEAKER_04: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel.com slash invisible. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bomba socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99 P-I and use code 99 P-I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas. B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99 P-I. Code 99 P-I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. That is the sound of exactly 2,008 drummers pounding away in perfect synchronicity during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The entire stadium pitched into darkness as the traditional Chinese faux drums glowed from within. It was just the start of a ceremony widely regarded as the most elaborate in Olympic history, and it was all designed and executed perfectly.
SPEAKER_05: But behind the scenes, there was one small hitch in the coverage of the event that went mostly unreported. Best producer Daniel Simo. During the parade of nations, Greece, as the birthplace of the Olympics, entered first. That's a long-standing tradition. But then the rest of the teams came out according to the number of strokes in the Chinese characters that comprise their name.
SPEAKER_04: The country of Jamaica, for example, was followed by Belgium. Then came Vanuatu, which in turn was followed by Israel. The U.S. team walked out somewhere in the middle. My home country of Australia was right at the back, 202nd in line.
SPEAKER_04: Ultimately, the sequence of nations was just a small detail. In a four-hour, $300 million ceremony, it should not have been the hard part. But for the Western networks covering the games, the parade proved a little tricky.
SPEAKER_06: Because it seems to us perfectly natural that the teams march in an alphabetical order. That's Judith Flanders, author of A Place for Everything, a book about the order of the Latin alphabet.
SPEAKER_05: So it made all of the Western networks scramble, because they simply didn't know when their own teams were going to come in and when they could go to commercial breaks.
SPEAKER_06: In the confusion of trying to figure out which countries came after which breaks, NBC later posted the footage to their website in the wrong order.
SPEAKER_05: This in turn sparked a short-lived message board conspiracy theory that the networks had deliberately changed up the order of nations in order to increase site traffic.
SPEAKER_06: You know, despite the fact that probably if you had asked the organizers doing the Olympic coverage, they would have known that Chinese does not use an alphabet. But it didn't quite penetrate. So in that way, you see how deeply embedded the alphabet is in our psyches.
SPEAKER_04: For much of the Western world, alphabetical order is the default. It's often the one we try first, or the one we use as a last resort when all other ordering methods fail. It's boring, but it works. And it's so ingrained that it's hard to imagine not using it. Except at one point, we didn't. Alphabetical order as a way to organize information is a pretty recent development, and its adoption is part of a radical shift in the way human beings learn, organize their thoughts, and even see their place in the world.
SPEAKER_05: But before you can order anything alphabetically, you need an alphabet.
SPEAKER_04: The alphabet is a concept of applying symbols to sounds and saying this stands for this, and this only.
SPEAKER_02: That's Timothy Donaldson, a type designer and lecturer at Falmouth University in England, and author of the book Shapes for Sounds.
SPEAKER_05: And Donaldson says that the process of assigning sounds to symbols took a long time, because at first, all we had were pictograms, images that represented whole objects or concepts, like in very early Sumerian writing. So if you wanted to represent the idea of a fish, you drew a fish.
SPEAKER_02: But what the problem it brings with it is you need a massive amount of symbols. You need thousands of symbols to represent every single thing. So the system is unwieldy.
SPEAKER_04: Eventually, these pictograms changed and became more abstract, and by 2800 BCE, certain marks began to represent syllables.
SPEAKER_05: But not individual consonants or vowels. So there might be a symbol for an entire syllable, like ga, but nothing yet for its component ga and a sounds individually, meaning each syllable in a language needed a sign. And they could get by with about 700 symbols. We call that a syllabary.
SPEAKER_04: But a syllabary still isn't an alphabet.
SPEAKER_03: But at some point, some clever, early Semitic-speaking someone saw that the Egyptians were writing stuff down and said, hey, we can do that for my language. That's Peter Daniels, an independent scholar specializing in ancient writing systems.
SPEAKER_05: Daniels says that the Egyptians were using their own complicated, non-syllabic system of symbols, when our hypothetical early Semitic someone decided to take that Egyptian system and simplify it.
SPEAKER_03: Because this clever inventor had the brilliant idea to use just one consonant per letter. Still no vowels, but with those consonants, they could write anything that needed to be written.
SPEAKER_05: Developing what some scholars considered to be the first true alphabet, and with it, the first alphabetical order.
SPEAKER_04: And that first ever alphabetical order would be instantly recognizable. It's the same basic order that the Latin alphabet uses today. In the 1940s, archaeologists found a set of small tablets with some 3200-year-old lettering in the ancient city of Ugarit in present-day Syria.
SPEAKER_03: With nothing on them but the 30 letters of the Ugaritic alphabet, and they were all written in the familiar order that became A, B, C, D, E, F, etc. Everything from A to T.
SPEAKER_04: T was the last letter in that particular alphabetical order.
SPEAKER_03: The exact shapes of the Ugaritic letters would go through a lot of changes as they got adapted. Early on by the Phoenicians, then the Greeks, and later the Romans.
SPEAKER_05: But the basic order was there from the beginning.
SPEAKER_04: But that raises a fundamental question. Why that order? Why A, B, C, and not N, Q, D, or R, G, L? And the answer is... well, we don't know. It was a long time ago.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, fair.
SPEAKER_03: There's no particular reason. We just learn the alphabet in the order it's in. There was, however, at least one competing alphabetical order from around that same time, found in the southern Arabian peninsula in present-day Yemen and Oman.
SPEAKER_05: So, similar alphabet, but different sequence. It went H, L, a strange looking letter I can't pronounce or recognize, M, R, etc.
SPEAKER_04: But outside of a few small areas, this other order never caught on, and for the usual reason.
SPEAKER_03: The one that won out was the one that was used by the people that went out and conquered other people. That just happens. The south Arabian people were more limited in their conquering. The Romans, on the other hand, loved conquering. And as they conquered, they spread their alphabetical order around.
SPEAKER_05: Although not before making some last minute tweaks. Take the final two letters, Y and Z.
SPEAKER_04: The Romans didn't use them.
SPEAKER_05: Tim Donaldson says that the ancient Greek equivalents of Y and Z had previously been dispersed in the middle of the Greek alphabet. But then the Romans chucked them out. Yeah, that was literally how it happened.
SPEAKER_02: And then eventually they found that they were useful, so they got brought back into the fold. That's why they're at the end. The letter K was luckier. It was also kicked out at some point, but then brought back in at the same spot as before.
SPEAKER_04: They also tried to introduce three new Roman letters. And it just didn't work.
SPEAKER_02: What were the letters? One was called digamma, and one looks, I can't remember the name of the other two, even though I wrote a book about it. So for the most part, the alphabet's order has proved remarkably stable.
SPEAKER_05: But despite its endurance, for most of its history, alphabetical order wasn't actually used to order much of anything.
SPEAKER_03: Alphabetical order was not all that important for anything beyond learning the alphabet.
SPEAKER_04: In societies like ancient Rome and early medieval Europe, writing implements were still rare. So what mattered most was organizing knowledge in a way that helped you to memorize it. And that was usually much easier to do in the order you naturally came across the information. So you might memorize the names of kings in chronological order, following who begat who.
SPEAKER_05: Or all the towns along the coastline from east to west. And Judith Flanders says that this means in most cases, alphabetical order would have been kind of useless.
SPEAKER_06: And the way I've begun to think of it is to say to people, okay, put the days of the week in alphabetical order.
SPEAKER_04: Let's see. Friday, Monday.
SPEAKER_06: And there's always a very long pause.
SPEAKER_04: Thursday, Tuesday.
SPEAKER_06: Because we don't think of them that way. We start at Monday.
SPEAKER_04: Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday. Jesus.
SPEAKER_05: So when it came to sorting and organizing actual information, for thousands of years people used almost any other method. They organized things by size, by geography, by chronology, just not alphabetically.
SPEAKER_04: But these early ordering methods also reflected the way people thought about the world. And one important way that they thought about it was hierarchically.
SPEAKER_05: In the Middle Ages, for example, William the Conqueror's Doomsday Book, which was a survey of all his subjects' property assets, was divided into sections that started with the nobles and ended with the peasants.
SPEAKER_06: So you move down not alphabetically, but through more or less who had more money and who had more power.
SPEAKER_04: Church documents also tended to reflect this hierarchical view.
SPEAKER_06: Where the church fathers come first and then other theological writers, then other less important writers, and finally whisper, pagan writers, they weren't even Christian. And they trail in at the end because they're not important. But nowhere was this hierarchical worldview more apparent than in encyclopedias.
SPEAKER_05: These books were primarily religious documents written by archbishops and monks who were attempting to create what they called a mirror of the world.
SPEAKER_04: Starting with God, the angels, and the saints at the front, and plants and inanimate objects at the very back. Humans were usually somewhere in the middle.
SPEAKER_05: Theological books might have glossaries of difficult terms at the back, but these would be organized in the order they appear in the book, not alphabetically. Because in a world where knowledge was considered complete and holistic, the point was not to look up only the facts you needed, but to read the book from beginning to end.
SPEAKER_04: You might occasionally come across a merchant's invoice or one small part of a dictionary organized alphabetically, but even as late as the Middle Ages, alphabetical order was still so rare that any time someone used it in a book, they would have to explain it.
SPEAKER_05: So you'd get this kind of primer from the author at the beginning, where he might say, if the topic you're interested in starts with Z, try looking towards the end. And it's perfectly clear he thinks he has invented it.
SPEAKER_06: And then each time another person uses it, they too explain it over and over. Slowly though, little by little, alphabetical order would start to catch on.
SPEAKER_05: We can't say why exactly, but Judith Flanders points to one potential reason. At least for those who knew their ABCs.
SPEAKER_06: Every other sorting order, you need to know a little bit about the subject to help you find things. Alphabetical order is the only sorting order that we have where you do not need to have any preliminary knowledge. And this proved useful in a world where increasingly there was just too much to remember.
SPEAKER_05: In the 11th and 12th centuries, with the arrival of paper technology from China, writing something down started to become a lot cheaper and more attractive than trying to memorize it. For theology students at European universities, this helped facilitate a new form of learning, one in which arguments and counterarguments were expected to be backed up by written evidence. But it also meant that now you had to know where to find all those sources, so you could cite them correctly.
SPEAKER_04: So scholars began developing innovative ways to search for information. Indexing, pagination, methods for cross-referencing one thing with another.
SPEAKER_06: And this brings with it the development of all of these things that help us locate things, or as I call it, look stuff up. We become a look stuff up world.
SPEAKER_05: And one of the handiest ways to look stuff up was simply by name. With alphabetical order, you didn't need to be an expert in a field to know where to find something.
SPEAKER_04: All you needed to know was how to spell it.
SPEAKER_05: Traveling Franciscan preachers, for example, might not actually have that much religious education. But now, they would have a small booklet with them which would provide talking points on different subjects from the Bible, just in time for their next sermon.
SPEAKER_06: So what these were is effectively, they were cheat sheets, and to make them easier to use, they were put in alphabetical order.
SPEAKER_05: Another big factor in the rise of alphabetical order was the arrival in the 15th century of the printing press. Now that books were easy to copy, publishers realized they could make big money selling multiple copies of a single title. And the bestsellers often turned out to be reference books. At first, many of these reference books still strive to be mirrors of the world, organized hierarchically.
SPEAKER_04: But as Enlightenment encyclopedists like Diderot incorporated more and more entries from more and more contributors,
SPEAKER_05: the easiest way to add a new entry without shuffling everything else around was just to organize it alphabetically. And so they cite the great hierarchy schemes, but they don't use it.
SPEAKER_06: And instead they say they're going to use alphabetical order because it is more convenient and easier. But even as scholars were busy alphabetizing the angels, other members of the establishment weren't happy about this new method of dividing up the world.
SPEAKER_04: To understand why, Flanders points to a 16th century bibliography dedicated to the King of France.
SPEAKER_05: And the compiler apologizes in his preface for putting it in alphabetical order because, he says, this might mean servants come before masters and children before their parents.
SPEAKER_06: It upends hierarchy and it is dangerous. Even worse, this was a way of organizing knowledge that allowed any literate person to choose what to learn.
SPEAKER_04: With alphabetical order, knowledge was no longer a fixed set of ideas to be handed down by learned authorities. Instead, it was up to the individual to decide what was worth discovering and what could be ignored. So if you've got gatekeepers to knowledge, those gatekeepers are going to think we're going to be out of work soon.
SPEAKER_06: And this feeling wasn't just restricted to a bunch of royal reactionaries in the 1500s.
SPEAKER_05: Alphabetical order's biggest hater was probably the early 19th century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge. He just despised it.
SPEAKER_06: Coleridge saved a special place in hell for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was, of course, organized alphabetically.
SPEAKER_04: As a theologian as well as a poet, he believed in the great hierarchy of knowledge and he thought Britain's preeminent reference book should reflect that. And he said, yes, it reflects the world.
SPEAKER_06: But once it's in this arbitrary and he thought ridiculous order, apple comes first just because it starts with A, what you've got is a broken mirror on the ground, each reflecting a little bit of the world but making no overall sense. Which, I'll admit, as far as literary criticism goes, is kind of beautiful.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, he was a poet.
SPEAKER_04: But he was also a snob, the kind of sub-stack writing intellectual that alphabetical order had been undermining all along.
SPEAKER_05: So, if anything, his objections made him seem a little out of touch. He was even parodied in novels as, quote, The chemical, botanical, geological, astronomical, mathematical, metaphysical, meteorological, anatomical, physiological, galvanistical, musical, pictorial, bibliographical, crucial, philosopher.
SPEAKER_06: In other words, he was an insufferable know-it-all.
SPEAKER_04: The truth is, by the time guys like Coleridge were shouting at alphabetical order to get off their lawn, the battle was already over.
SPEAKER_05: At some point, when no one was looking, without needing a great champion to advance it or a campaign to promote it, alphabetical order had won. And other possibilities sort of faded.
SPEAKER_06: People lost sight of the fact that there are other possibilities.
SPEAKER_04: Today, organizing information according to its name has become so commonplace that it often just goes unnoticed. But it still comes with its own biases. Just ask anyone whose name starts with a letter at the end of the alphabet.
SPEAKER_05: Academic economists are more likely to be cited, get jobs at prestigious universities, and even win Nobel Prizes if their names are higher up in the alphabet. Political candidates are more likely to win if they have early alphabet names rather than late names. There is even something called alphabet fatigue, which is a phenomenon where a dictionary or encyclopedia team becomes less and less thorough as they move through the letters.
SPEAKER_04: The first alphabetized edition of Encyclopedia Britannica had three volumes, each of roughly equal length. Volume 1 was A through B.
SPEAKER_06: And of course, as we know, there are plenty of cultures and languages and civilizations that have done perfectly nicely without an alphabet. And they have no problem with other sorting systems. During the Ming Dynasty in 15th century China, the largest general encyclopedia in history was organized according to a well-known rhyming scheme.
SPEAKER_05: It remained the world's largest reference book for six centuries, and it worked just fine.
SPEAKER_04: And in the 21st century, people have started turning to other ways of finding and sorting information. Even as much of the internet's underlying infrastructure depends on it, no one uses alphabetical order to search through Wikipedia or to decide which article to click on next. Instead of indexes organized alphabetically, we have hyperlinks leading in a thousand different directions. Alphabetical order may have won when no one was looking, but now, just as quietly, it's being rendered obsolete.
SPEAKER_06: So we may discover that alphabetical order is a phase, an 8th century phase, but it might be a phase.
SPEAKER_04: Do we have a coda for this story? Yes we do. After this.
SPEAKER_07:
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SPEAKER_05: And it turns out that Judith Flanders really, really hates someone. And I found this out towards the end of the interview when I was wrapping things up and I asked my standard kind of wrap up question. And I just want to play you some of that tape. Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you think would be important to mention?
SPEAKER_06: There isn't. The only thing I wonder if you want me to do, just because you said you wanted a couple of sort of character driven things. Yeah, yeah. Is the hideous Melville Dewey. At which point you're like, oh yes, please talk about the hideous Melville Dewey.
SPEAKER_04: Exactly. Yes, please.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. I mean, you know, Dewey is not interesting in terms of alphabetical order, except he didn't use it. But he was so ghastly. I mean, apart from anything else, the moron spelt his name M-E-L-V-I-L. I mean, really.
SPEAKER_04: I didn't think I could love Judith Flanders anymore, but I really enjoy how much she seems to not enjoy Melville Dewey.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And so Melville Dewey, for those who don't know, is the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, or officially the Dewey Decimal Classification, or DDC, which is a sorting method for libraries that is still very common in the US and many libraries today.
SPEAKER_04: So apart from the objectionable way that Judith thinks he spells his name, what doesn't she like about him? Well, she's got a few issues.
SPEAKER_05: Okay. So basically, Melville Dewey was born in a small town in upstate New York in 1851. And he actually changed the spelling of his name when he was quite young, because he was a fan of the movement at the time to simplify English spelling. For a while, he even changed the spelling of his last name to D-U-I. That didn't stick? No, that one didn't stick. Apparently, the bank refused to recognize his signature. Yeah, if you can't cash checks, then it doesn't stick.
SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
SPEAKER_05: So Dewey, D-E-W-E-Y, graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts. And Judith Flanders says that soon after he was made a librarian there. So he's still in his 20s, but he was asked to catalog its library.
SPEAKER_06: The odds are pretty good he didn't know much about library classification. So he returned to the idea of a hierarchy of knowledge, which is based on the older classical liberal arts idea.
SPEAKER_05: And it's important to point out that a lot of libraries back then, just like now, were already organized by subject, at least on some level. So all the calculus books would be in one place and all the American history books would be in another. But Dewey took the basic idea and kind of went, let's say, mad with power. He really believed, just like Coleridge, that all knowledge was connected in this elegant hierarchy. So in his new system, once you got to the subject area, it would just be divided into smaller subject areas, which themselves would be divided into yet smaller subject areas and so on and so on. So it becomes subjects all the way down.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and this was his eponymous Dewey Decimal System or Dewey Decimal Classification.
SPEAKER_05: And the reason it has the word decimal in there is because all of these subjects were assigned numbers. So, for example, the 500s are natural sciences, 590 is zoology, 595 is other invertebrates, 595.7 is insect, and eventually you get to butterflies if you follow along.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, well, that makes sense. Okay. It doesn't seem like this is a real problem so far.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It wasn't totally a bad idea.
SPEAKER_05: And perhaps more importantly, at that time, it offered this kind of ready-made, off-the-rack solution for organizing books. And it ended up getting picked up by a lot of these institutions throughout the second half of the 19th century. So, you know, even if it's not perfect, it's used so widely that you could go to any library in the country and know where to find things.
SPEAKER_04: And that's probably its biggest advantage. Definitely. It's ubiquity, basically.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. But Judith Flanders points out that it had a few big problems. The benefit is if you want to find out about a subject you work at, which its number is, you go to the shelves and there are all the books.
SPEAKER_06: So it helps you find out about a subject more generally. What it doesn't do is help you find a specific book. And this is sort of the crux. So if you're looking for a specific book and you don't know where to classify it, you know, like in the.7,.6,.3 way, you know, it may be hierarchical, it may be logical.
SPEAKER_04: But it's not really all that intuitive of where you place every book in the human world. No, it's not. Dooey had no choice but to pair his system with a card catalog, which would tell you where to find the book.
SPEAKER_05: And do you want to guess what sorting method the Dooey Decimal System card catalog uses? I don't need to guess. It's alphabetical order.
SPEAKER_04: Yep. Yep. Our old friend. So in the end, you know, as much as you want to order the world into these blocks of 100 numbers and subdivide it and subdivide it and subdivide it, when you get to the bottom, you have to get to alphabetical order. It sort of underlies everything. Yeah. Yeah. Although it should be pointed out that Dooey managed to turn this to his advantage because what Dooey did was to push the American Library Association, which he had co-founded in 1876, to standardize the index card size and to then use a company he created called the Library Bureau to provide all the supplies needed to manage those card catalogs.
SPEAKER_05: Whoa. That's very enterprising and a little bit sneaky. I mean, is this the reason why Judith hates him? Like, because of this, you know, way of profiting from the library system?
SPEAKER_04: No, it's not. Instead, it turns out that the card catalog is the least of the Dooey system's problems because when you start digging into its classification system, you soon realize that the problem was mostly Dooey himself and how he saw the world.
SPEAKER_05: All sorting systems have biases. Dooey's has more biases than most, and in the modern world, it is particularly troublesome. It is entirely Anglo-centric. It is almost comically Christian-centric.
SPEAKER_05: So Christianity was given all the numbers between 200 and 289, whereas Islam is given only a single number, 297.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, and women are originally categorized very neatly next to etiquette. Bitter? Me? No, not at all. But beyond the system that he created, there was just Dooey the man.
SPEAKER_05: Dooey himself was a mind-blowingly awful person. I say this with complete prejudice. He founded the American Library Association, but was forced to step down when four women complained that he had assaulted them in a two-week period.
SPEAKER_06: He was anti-Semitic. He was racist. Even in anti-Semitic and racist days, he was considered to be pretty horrible. So he was also asked to stand down from his position as librarian for New York State for his Christian whites-only policies. And if you can imagine in those times, it must have taken an awful lot for him to get to that stage.
SPEAKER_04: Wow, I had some vague notion that Dooey was a problem, but I had no idea just how awful he really was. Yeah, yeah, he definitely was. And because of all this undeniable awfulness, the American Library Association recently decided to take his name off their top leadership honor.
SPEAKER_05: It used to be called the Melville Dooey Medal, but in 2020, it was changed to the ALA Medal of Excellence. But the thing is, even if Dooey himself isn't well-remembered, his system is still going strong. Despite the fact that it just doesn't work very well anymore, but of course undoing an entire library and re-categorizing becomes very difficult, so people on the whole don't.
SPEAKER_06: So other sorting methods have been developed, and the Library of Congress has its own system, but according to recent estimates, roughly 200,000 libraries in 135 countries still use the Dooey Decimal Classification.
SPEAKER_05: Wow. So Judith hates him, but the world embraced him early, and then therefore we're just kind of stuck with Dooey's hierarchy, for better or worse.
SPEAKER_04: Very much so.
SPEAKER_05: Thank you, Dan. Thanks, Armin.
SPEAKER_04: And me, Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. Here's a fact I didn't know until I had kids in my thirties. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Seriously, it blew my mind. Stitcher, Sirius XM.
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SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to our studio, where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.
