I woke this morning with a feeling that I had an important public service that I needed to perform today. At first, I was unsure what it was. No mysterious instructions had appeared in tattoo form on my body overnight, and I had not received an email from God.
But as the day progressed, I slowly started to realise what I had to do. The final piece slipped into place when I looked at a sign (it was a Sign!) and saw that it was made of... letters. But some letters are not as good as other letters and I finally figured out that what I needed to do was rank the letters. Not just the letters in the sign, but all the letters, every single one. It was necessary for me to determine which letter of the alphabet is most popular, and which could do with a bit of a hug. And that's what I will do here and now, as a favour to the world.
I'll use the tried and tested method of Googling them, one by one, and ranking popularity by the number of hits. To give a sense of scale, a popular search like "Lint" gets 2,200,000 hits, whilst "Michael Jackson's Monkey" gets just 394 hits. Which means that I am officially more popular than Michael Jackson's Monkey! Result!
Anywards, on with the letters:
A: 4,480,000,000
B: 665,000,000
C: 1,030,000,000
D: 1,290,000,000
E: 2,330,000,000
F: 590,000,000
G: 443,000,000
H: 451,000,000
I: 2,090,000,000
J: 492,000,000
K: 458,000,000
L: 921,000,000
M: 960,000,000
N: 760,000,000
O: 839,000,000
P: 605,000,000
Q: 306,000,000
R: 339,000,000
S: 1,780,000,000
T: 1,560,000,000
U: 542,000,000
V: 280,000,000
W: 686,000,000
X: 639,000,000
Y: 372,000,000
Z: 330,000,000
If we then list the letters starting with most popular and ending with least popular, we get:
AEISTDCMLONWBXPFUJKHGYRZQV
I'm not sure how stable this sequence is over time. It's worth remembering it though, since it could come up in a pub quiz one day.
A good way to remember something like that is with an entertaining mnemonic. Feel free to create your own if you want - I'd share the one that I have just devised, but I don't want to. It's private and it's mine.
So the conclusion is that poor old V isn't well liked. So here's my effort to give V the big hug that it needs:
V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V V
That should help it to feel better liked.
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4 comments:
And to think of all those times I said you should stop drinking. It turns out you are, in fact, a real-life Fun Bobby.
Odd that H, which is 8th most commonly used letter in English, comes only 20th in this list, and O is 10th here as compared to 4th. I expect that most of these come from acronyms, so perhaps yours is more indicative of how common each letter is at the start of a word, rather than overall frequency.
And we shouldn't forget the fact that "v" did have a television series named after it at one point, which should be a big ego booster in itself.
And all sorts of films - Rocky, Police Academy, Friday 13th, Star Wars, ...
And some of those may have got as far as X... I think there was definitely a Jason X...
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