👉 Okay, settle yourselves down now folks! Let’s tackle this rather… pedestrian little bit of Anglo-Saxon weirdness – the frankly insulting and occasionally quite amusing pairing:
"alphabet, alphabetical."
Now, before you immediately think I've spent too long in the beige trenches of academic stuff, let me assure you. It's a ridiculous, almost tragically pretty pointless piece of verbal tackiness, really. Historically? A right mess. Basically, we owe it entirely to 18th and early 19th-century English gentlemen who felt the need to be unnecessarily fussy about their… arrangements, and frankly, probably spent far too long alphabetising their snuff boxes. Let's unpack that. The original word, alphabet , simply meant a child’s alphabet book – the kind of thing you gave a sickly only son to fill his tedious afternoons. You see, it combined the initials for the first two letters in the alphabet (A and B) into a single, rather grand-sounding, name for something rather… domestic. Then came the addition of that awful 'alphabetical. . To describe things arranged according to the alphabet, you just tacked this ridiculous adverb on! Why? Nobody actually knows. It was apparently fashionable at the time to be exquisitely and aggressively specific about everything. You wouldn’t just say, "the letters here," you absolutely had to state it with that verbose little mouthful. There's a weird
