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A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W

31 points NaOH 1 hour ago 19 comments

neuroelectron 55 minutes ago | parent

(U ω U)

AnodicElegy 41 minutes ago | parent

The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.

andsoitis 38 minutes ago | parent

> I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.

I support your campaign. Other candidates: wa, weh, wu

MrBuddyCasino 31 minutes ago | parent

In German its „weh“. But then V is „phau“, so its not as easy to confuse as in English.

andsoitis 20 minutes ago | parent

I know German.

In English, I don’t think vee and weh would be confused, but I’m partial to wa.

BoorishBears 35 minutes ago | parent

Why not simple, W: making a mouth shape as-if to say "What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead

jfengel 30 minutes ago | parent

In German it's called "vay". That's brief, and gets a few million people on your side.

anamexis 24 minutes ago | parent

Counterpoint: Ypsilon.

k__ 12 minutes ago | parent

Fair, but Y isn't used much in German.

anon_cow1111 29 minutes ago | parent

Stupid, but related amusing nostalgia:

By default. Unreal Tournament 2003/4 used to have in-game text chat that would use the "Microsoft Sam" voice synthesizer to read player messages aloud to everyone in the room... MS Sam took so long to pronounce the letter "W /DoubleYou" that you could just go into a server and a drop a 512 character "W-bomb" and leave. Everyone in the room would have to listen to several minutes of dubbayou's assuming they never turned off the voice feature.

(I miss those days of genuinely annoying but still apolitical random trolling)

nkrisc 28 minutes ago | parent

Or, of course, WWW (world-wide web) where each word of the acronym is itself a single syllable. This means the acronym is 6 syllables longer if you were speaking it.

pavlov 10 minutes ago | parent

It’s commonly called “dub” when brevity is called for, as in “dub dub dub” = www.

Or is this just a tech industry idiom that I’ve been taking for granted…

ortusdux 6 minutes ago | parent

It's also the only letter that is not used in its own pronunciation. It really breaks the cadence of alphabet books!

yongjik 6 minutes ago | parent

The name for "Y" starts with a "w" sound, so why not make it symmetric: let's call "Y" why and "W" yay.

zarzavat 19 minutes ago | parent

Would be remiss to not mention W's biopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y