The Alphabet As High School Class

About a week ago, I was driving down near the Plaza when I noticed I was following an "extreme" car. It was an Escort or something equally NOT extreme, but it was labeled as such on the back. And then I noticed the "x" in "extreme" was bigger than the other letters and yellow, as though the inclusion of the letter "x" made the word EVEN HIPPER.

It was then that it occurred to me that almost anything can be jazzed up by adding an "x" or a "z" to the name. Car manufacturers are well aware of this, especially BMW, a manufacturer so enamored with letters its very name is an acronym.

"E" and "i" kind of got a makeover in the late nineties, with the addition of e-commerce, e-mail, i-control, etc. I mean, "e" used to be silent half the time, for God's sake. When I think of a typed "e," with an old typewriter, especially, the vision practically screams bun-headed librarian. Can there be a more uptight looking letter than a typed "e"? But oh, no, "e" is now the fat kid that went away to summer camp and came back twenty pounds thinner wearing low-riders and a tube top.

But what about the rest of the alphabet? What about the letter "m"? Nobody thinks it is particularly cool. I can't remember the last time marketers fixated on a "b." "T" got some minor fame during space exploration, what with t minus this and that all the time. It's really quite an unfair distribution of fame. The alphabet is really just a little microcosm of modern society, and most of are somewhere in the middle, after "i" but before "x." Sigh.