The Most Dangerous Letter

The other day I was asking a friend who's living in Port-au-Prince if she knew anything about how Haiti same to have so many k's. The inspiration was the mountain village of Kenscoff, just south of the capital, that figures in Graham Greene's novel The Comedians. We're still trying to track down the origin of that name, but Kreyol (aka Haitian Creole) has lots of k's, whereas French, the country's other national language, has, more or less none.

A few searches turned up a great long answer, a chapter in the book Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory

My take-away from the article (most of which you can, and should, read) that Kreyol orthographies are various and contested, and that the first major promoted one (McConnell-Laubach) seems to have been introduced by American protestant missionaries (hey, we do love translating into local dialects!). The Wikipidia entry on Haitian Creole points out that most Kreyol spellings are very similar to the words' renditions in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Meanwhile, I'll type for you my favorite sentence from the Language Ideologies chapter...

Among the most contested letters is k, which not only represents the danger of U.S. imperialism but has even been claimed to represent the threat of communism.

As for k's in French, they're all from other, non-romance languages. Here's the entire k section from the admittedly pocket-sized 1968 Dennison French Dictionary ("All Important Words"):

kangaurou, kayak, képi, kilogramme, kilometre, kiosque

What's really fun is imagining using all six of those words in a single sentence!

--

The whole idea of dangerous letters leads us, of course, to Costa-Garvas's 1969 film Z, a very slight fictionalization ("Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.") of a political murder in 1960s Greece.

The film (quite good and gripping, by the way), explains its title in a bit of screen text tacked at the end of the epilogue, just after we hear of the subsequent terrible things that happened to all the characters:

Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labor strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoyevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!"

Re:Rereading. Also, Men in Boats Asleep

PATRICIA: Have you ever slept on a boat before?
JOE: No.
PATRICIA: It really affects your dreams. I look forward to it. Even though, sometimes, the dreams really shake me up. Okay. Good night.
JOE: Good night.

—John Patrick Shanley, Joe Versus the Volcano

A few days ago I finished rereading the Odyssey—I think this was the third time to completion. Among other things it brought back to mind a question I've asked myself before, whether it's better to read three great books once or one great book three times (or, indeed, whether they amount to somewhat the same thing). In the past year or so I've fallen out of the habit of having one of the 6–8 books I'm working through at a given time (not counting the Bible and Book of Common Prayer) be a reread. New ground is always so tempting, but I think it's a good discipline. But did I start a new-oldie after the Odyssey? Not yet anyway.

One detail of Homer's plot that I was especially thrilled to rediscover is that Odysseus, the great wide-awake sefarer, sleeps through the whole of his final homeward voyage. The crew that's bringing him back to Ithaca carries him and his parting gifts ashore so he wakes on dry land. There's something very moving about that image, and its other ancient parallels: Jonah asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed ship that's (trying) to take him away from Ninevah and God's calling; and Jesus, asleep in the bow of a similarly wind-vexed boat on the Sea of Galilee, right before his disciples woke him up and he calmed the storm. Three great wanderers, asleep at the wheel.