Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for May 02, 2020

well, alpha and beta are the first two letters of the GREEK alphabet from where you get the word “alphabet”

At some point someone just decided to put the alphabet in alphabetical order.

The Christmas alphabet.

ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

The breathing thing? I actually remember when that changed for me.

Where in Massachusetts? Boston?

A collection of bad art? I should have saved my attempts at art from High School and sent it to them! They would have a whole wing!

“Now I know my ABC’s. Next time, won’t you sing with me?”

i always thought it’s because of the song………

Did anyone try to swallow and breathe at the same time after reading the strip? ….. I did.

But do you know which English word contains all of the vowels in alphabetical order? And by all of the vowels in alphabetical order, I mean….

a e i o u y

Because “Y” is a crooked letter and it can’t be straightened out?

Steven Wright says the alphabet is in that order because of the song.

Myself, as well as many of my friends, can dring a bottle of beer and breathe at the same time. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember in my 76 years.

The order was established by the goddess Elemenope.

Imagine trying to sing the alphabet song with a different order of letters.Secondly, if the alphabet were in a different order it might not spell the words, “HI,” and, “NO,” but spell some words you wouldn’t want kids seeing or singing.

Steven Wright said it’s in that order because of the song…

I’m sure.

Along the lines of really bad art, when my kids were younger and we happened to be at the local Ross for Less store; we would see who could find the ugliest coat. Ross is where coats go to die……

the ability to swallow and breathe at the same time is so they can nurse, the down side is that this robs them of the ability to talk. As for the alphabet, I just figured the order was to have it rhyme when sung to the tune of “twinkle twinkle little star”abcdefG, hijklmnoP, qrstuV, wxy and Z, now I know my abc’s, next time won’t you sing with me.

Noel, Noel……. so we took the bus. (Old Philly – or Chicago – joke)

Because it is in alphabetical order! Duh!

I read, some time ago now, that what we call ‘A’ is the first letter, because it is the simplest sound to make. Just open the mouth and make a sound. What results is the the sound ‘ah’, which is how ‘A’, from the Latin alphabet is pronounced, in most of the rest of the world. And, originally, it was drawn more like < which is a graphic representation of how to make the sound. The two lines represent the upper and lower jaws, and the opening is the mouth, of course. The graphic for the sound ‘O’ is, obviously, the shape the mouth makes to make the sound. Not all sounds are humanly represented. ‘S’ comes from a shape made by a common source of the sound, a snake, which also makes the shape when it moves. ‘B’ is the second sound, in English, though in Greek it is actually a ‘V’ sound, pronounced ‘vita’, not ‘beta’. The Greek letter represents the lower lip curled into the teeth, accompanied by making a sound behind it that is carried through the lip/teeth by the air that is released. Many of the modern confusions of how to pronounce names in Greek are the result of how 19th C explorers/adventurers/scholars saw the language written in ancient texts, and, without consulting any native speakers, assumed they just ‘knew’ how to pronounce it.

I never noticed that I couldn’t breathe and swallow at the same time, until I tried it just now.