One-letter word

[15] Marcel Proust, on the other hand, distinguishes between the nom propre (proper noun) and the mot commun (common noun), because for him, as Roland Barthes puts it, the mot commun is "a voluminous sign, a sign always full of a thick, dense layer of meaning, which no use reduces or flattens, unlike the nom commun:"[16] "Words present us with a small, clear and usual image of things [...] But names present people - and cities, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique as people - with a confused image that draws from them, from their bright or dark sound, the color with which it is uniformly painted.

[27][28] The sixteenth-century typographical use of "q̃" for "que," notably by Joachim du Bellay[29] and Jean de Sponde,[30] could lead us to consider it a diacritical letter.

[42] Reflections on the meaning and importance of one-letter words, however, return to a debate on which Plato took a stance in the Cratylus, and which Gérard Genette summarizes as follows: "Placed between two opponents, one of whom (Hermogenes) holds to the so-called conventionalist thesis [...] according to which names simply result from an agreement and convention [...] between men, and the other (Cratylus) to the so-called naturalistic thesis [...] according to which each object has received a "right name" that belongs to it according to a natural propriety, Socrates seems first to support the second against the first, then the first against the second".

The cratylic impulse has long haunted theories of language, leading to the attribution of mimetic meaning to letters in general, and to single-letter words in particular.

As Genette points out, this supposed mimesis is not only phonic, but sometimes graphic too: "Writing can be conceived, as well as speech, as an imitation of the objects it designates [...] A so-called phonetic script, such as ours, can also be conceived as an imitation of the sounds it notes, each letter (for example) being the visual analogon of a phoneme [... ] Mimology in general can be divided into mimophony (the terrain of classical cratylism) and mimography, which in turn is subdivided into ideomimography and phonomimography.

[51]Philologist Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, a contemporary of Gébelin and influenced by him,[52] believes that the one-letter word represents "a simple, non-compounded, non-complex thing, such as a single-stranded rope.

[62][63][64] Linguists Yannick Marchand and Robert Damper also note the absence of the word "A" from the lexical database they rely on, taken from an edition of Webster's English dictionary.

According to him, the only other work on the subject is a dictionary of one-letter words in Pali, compiled by the sixteenth-century Buddhist lexicographer Saddhammakitti[77] and entitled Ekakkharakosa.

For example, the use of a single letter for the middle name, perceived as valorizing,[96][97] is sometimes accepted, e.g. S for President Truman,[98][99] and sometimes criticized, e.g. V for English politician Grant Shapps.

[104][105] Joanne Rowling attributes the addition of an unjustified K to her first name to her publisher, who was keen to attract a readership of young boys.

[106][107] In Myanmar, the word U, meaning uncle,[108] is added in front of the surname as a mark of the notoriety enjoyed,[109] for example, by U Nu, U Pandita or U Thant.

[121] However, diacritical letters are coded differently from one manufacturer to another, because, for example: â, ë and ç cannot all be used at the same time within the 160-character limit, which makes the billing of messages containing them uncertain.

[123] A character in James Joyce's Ulysses speaks of books yet to be written: "You were bowing to the mirror, stepping forward, taking the applause, serious as a pope, very striking face.

Ah yes, W."Unbeknownst to Joyce, F would be written by Daniel Kehlmann in 2013, Q by Luther Blissett in 1999, and Georges Perec's W, published in 1975, would describe a country "where sport and life merge in the same magnificent effort."

"[nb 15][126] Several films also have a single-letter title, such as Alexandre Arcady's K, Oliver Stone's W., Fritz Lang's M and its remake by Joseph Losey, or Costa-Gavras' Z, based on the novel of the same name.

This is particularly true of works by Russian poets of the futurist Zaum movement, including Vasilisk Gnedov,[135][136] Aleksej Kručënyx[137] and Ilia Zdanevich.

[143] He also indulged in a literary experiment in the 1970s, inventing a female "alter ego",[144] Joyce Holland, a minimalist poet[145] played by his partner, P. J. Casteel, whose existence was acknowledged even by The New York Times.

[148][149] In 1973, in Alphabet Anthology, Joyce Holland collected one-letter poems chosen for the occasion by 104 American poets,[150] including Bruce Andrews ("o"), Larry Eigner ("e") and Bernadette Mayer ("n").

[156] But above all, they are the subject of a notable experiment by François Le Lionnais, dating from 1957 and published in La Littérature potentielle in 1973, of "Réduction d'un poème à une seule lettre".

"[159] According to Harry Mathews, this is in fact a reduction of a device comparable to Raymond Queneau's Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.

He designed, on the principle of perpetual motion, that the following sentence would be inscribed on the front and back of a page: "J'ai inventé le mouvement perpétuel T.S.V.P."

While praising Harry Mathews' "learned commentary" on the point, he considers that "there is nothing to prevent from thinking that it could be [...] a period" and that "in the author's mind, there is a hesitation as to the exact nature of his 'attempt' and of the 'work' to which said attempt has led".

For Bénabou, the choice of the letter T is explained primarily by personal reasons, but also by the characteristics of this consonant, which is at once homophonic, polyphonic and polysemous.

Bénabou observes, however, that Le Lionnais "doesn't seem to have taken any notice" of the "properly oral" dimension of the one-letter word, and in this connection evokes an "oulipien debate" for which Jacques Bens proposed I, which should read "un en chiffre romain et en garamond gras" or "one in Roman numerals and in bold garamond," as it were.

[nb 19] Finally, Bénabou recalls an anecdote told by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions: "I read that a wise bishop on a tour of his diocese found an old woman who for all her prayers knew only how to say O.

[nb 20]He believes that the reader should also assure Le Lionnais that his poem is worth more than he thinks, as it "in no way leads to a dead end, but on the contrary to fantastic enrichment."

In 2007, Jacques Jouet finally responded to Le Lionnais' call, asking his Oulipo colleagues to "renew the gesture" by composing their own reduction.