Plurk paste

Part 1: Alphabet

So, you've probably been sent to watch this video because of something to do with something called "alphabetical order". "Alphabetical" is a huge word, and probably sounds really technical, right? Some sort of computer science thing? No, really it's not. It's probably one of the biggest words kindergartners are expected to learn, up there with "kindergarten" itself, but it's not some technical term. The alphabet is nothing more than the set of all letters, and alphabetical order the traditional order of those letters. It's such a big deal, in fact, that there's a song about it to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star":

(And sing it, with the letters onscreen and being highlighted along the way.)

[Switch to scrolling image of ancient text, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_script#/media/File:Evolution_of_minuscule.svg ]
This is a very, *very* old order. Not just older than your grandparents, not just older than the United States, older than the idea of countries having defined borders and not just invading your neighbors whenever it was convenient. To oversimplify, its roots go back to ancient Rome; even as it evolved over the course of a thousand years after the Roman Empire's fall to better accommodate other European languages, it still got called the Latin alphabet, after the language the Romans used. Heck, the word "alphabet" stretches even farther back, coming from places like the ancient Greek "alpha-beta" and ancient Hebrew "aleph-bet" — their versions of "ABCs", basically.

[Old printing press]
Once the movable type printing press was invented and spread across Europe (and China separately, but we're talking about English here), the Latin alphabet as it was at the time became kind of a compromise script for all of Western Europe. [A café marked café?] Some languages try to adapt the alphabet to their language better with accents, or diacritical marks if you want to sound fancy. [Normal alphabet] The British, though, wanted English to replace Latin as the language of serious scholarship, and figured that using the Latin alphabet's standard form at the time was important to being seen as a proper replacement, so stuck to the letters as they were even when letters represented lots of different possible sounds, [uppercase and lowercase thorn] and even when adding in some new letters would've made sense for us. Sucks to be us, I guess.

[Alphabet again.]
Now, traditional alphabetical order might not have been the only order you've seen the letters shown in. [Image of a computer keyboard.] You may well have seen this order more often. Why is it different? Well, computer keyboards are based on the next big analog tech for writing after the printing press — typewriters. [Image of a typewriter.] While computer keyboards just make letters appear onscreen through the magic of word processing protocols, [video of typewriting?] typewriters actually involved triggering levers to punch through an ink ribbon to print letters on paper. Fancy, right? The thing is, if you weren't careful, the levers could run into each other and get stuck. [Image of a typewriter key jam?] The very first typewriter prototypes were especially prone to that because the keys were put in the obvious order — traditional alphabetical order. A lot of more commonly-used letters are near the start of the alphabet, and less-used ones nearer to the end. On top of that, using that order made it too easy to type faster than the things could handle. So, they mixed it up to slow things down, and we got what's called QWERTY order. It's still the whole alphabet, just not in alphabetical order.

[Library shelves] Anyway, as stuff out of printing presses and typewriters piled up, people needed to organize them. One easy and obvious way to do it was in alphabetical order. Even today, fiction books are often organized at least in part by alphabetical order of the author's last name, even if nonfiction tends to be ordered by subject instead. [Card catalog] Back before there were computers you could run searches on to find where things were in libraries, there were also card catalogs that let you flip through and find things by the book's title or author — again, in alphabetical order. [Filing cabinet] Paper records in businesses and government offices and such tend to be alphabetized too. [Large parking lot?] Even things that have nothing to do with writing at all are sometimes labeled with letters in that order to help people navigate them. So knowing traditional alphabetical order's pretty important.

When things are sorted in alphabetical order, that means they're sorted by the first letter of the first word of the field being checked — surname, title, or whatever. Since this is English, the first letter is the one farthest left. After that, they're sorted alphabetically by the second letter, then the third, and so on. In theory, the word "the" doesn't count in alphabetical order, but some computers don't know that and sort without accounting for that exception. Numerals in titles typically come before the letter A in the order as well.

[chord] Ready for another round? (sing with highlighted letters again)