2/12/2006

The Letter A is a Boy

Does anyone else out there classify letters and numbers according to gender? I don't know what happened to me in my childhood. Maybe it was the government schooling. Maybe in Kindergarten the teacher had paper letters up on the wall that looked like either boys or girls. I don't know. I never thought much about it until I really thought about it. I mean, I noticed that I did this in my brain a few years ago. I am writing down a letter or two and here I am thinking of "J" as a boy and "K" as a girl. They aren't in any particular order either. Let's see..

A,C,E,F,G,H,I,J,M,N,O,S,T,W,X,Z are all males.

B,D,K,L,P,Q,R,U,V,Y are all females.

Some letters are sort of a little more neuter than others, like, P, L, E, O, and Y. But of course I can regard them as more male than female or more female than male. Weird, huh?

Here are the numbers:

1,2,3,5,7,10 are all males

4,6,8, and 9 are all females

It is almost silly of me to confess this, but I almost feel inside that this is common knowledge and I am not telling anyone anything else that they already don't know. Notice that the letter R is a girl. I bet I think so because my name starts with R.

Ok, I am thinking about this way too much. I need a shrink.

I told this to a close friend of mine about a year ago and I asked her if she thought I was weird. She hesitated and then said, "Well, yes, that is a little odd. But I do some weird things in my head too. The brain is just weird." She was being kind. But she did proceed to tell me that ever since she has taken jobs transcribing (she is a very swift typist) she thinks of conversations with her fingers. She literally has conversations with people and in her brain she is thinking about the placement of each letter on the keyboard with her fingers. Sometimes she finds herself slightly moving them.
She told me of another person she knows that has conversations with people and as she is talking to them or they are talking to her she is thinking of the words backwards. So, for example, if she were listening to someone saying a sentence to her like, "I walked the dog this morning" she would think of how the whole sentence is pronounced backwards, like backward masking or something crazy like that.

Hey, in many languages like Latin and French there are masculine and feminine (and neuter) words. Maybe I am really a genius!

2 comments:

Gatsby24 said...

I use to do the exact same thing...I only took it a little farther to make them into a weird soap opera.
5 is the father of 6 who really likes 7 but her father wants her to marry 8. Obviously 8 is bigger than 7 and can beat him up but 7 looks much cooler. Of course there is more but no need in professing the totality of my weirdness.

R said...

That is the coolest. See, to me that would be weird if six married 8. Eight is a girl! Six is a girl! Yuck!

That is a little strange. I think while I was thinking gender in the fresh years (Kindergarten, most likely), I was eating the "counting" pinto beans. No time for soaps.