Alphabetter Juice by Roy Blount Jr

Author:Roy Blount Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

l · L · l

This letter ought not to be so angular; the l sound goes with long, slow, flowing, relaxed, langourous lolling. Certainly there was nothing cut-and-dried about the old unit of measure, the ell. The foot, the yard, the inch, the cubit varied, but the ell was all over the place. Originally it represented an arm. Or just a forearm. The English ell was 45 inches, the Scots one 37.2, the Flemish one 27, we are told by OED, which then cites a period authority as saying that in Scotland an ell was either 42 or 38, and another that 50 English ells were equal to 102 Danish. I don’t think we can find in those numbers the answer to whether the Danes or the Scots had shorter arms. Than each other. Or than the English.

Why should we care about the ell? Well, it’s related to our elbow, isn’t it? The el- means arm, the -bow means bend. Or if you go back farther, according to John Ayto, the el- comes from a PIE root (which also gave us ulna, the longer forearm bone) meaning bend, so an elbow is a bend-bend proposition (unless you happen to catch one in the head), which fits right in with this little festival of flexibility.

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