Do you write a lowercase ‘a’ with or without its ‘little hat’? 🧢
It seems that Emma Stone plumps for an ‘easy A’. Her obsession with Baby Spice prompted her to ditch ‘Emily’, so I imagine she copied Emma Bunton’s writing style too…
I have always had an irrational aversion to the double-storey ‘a’, i.e. the hatted version. A couple of years ago, I wrote a haiku after accidentally writing a double-storey ‘a’ in my diary because it made me feel somewhat disgusted with myself.
This hatted, ostentatious little ‘a’ character possibly reminds me of unsavoury graffiti tags left in local parks by intimidating older kids who often bunked off school to sniff toddler-safe Pritt sticks. I suppose it is quite ironic that an indefinite article reminds me of definitely inarticulate people. It still seems weird to me that those people would go to the effort of making an extra stroke on the paper (or wall, bus seat or park swings) when they worked so hard to do the bare minimum and avoid the (admittedly humdrum) compulsory education we were afforded. Perhaps they were silently protesting against cursive writing, or maybe they secretly liked calligraphy. Who knows.
The history of the minuscule, or lowercase, ‘a’ is complex and, like everything, is not universally agreed upon. The single-storey ‘a’ can be traced back to the early Roman Empire’s cursive script, whereas its counterpart can be found in Uncial and Half-Uncial scripts, around 4-8 CE. The printing press is said to have revolutionised the ‘a’ in the fifteenth century, breathing life back into the hatted ‘a’. It was too easy to confuse a blurry circle-and-line ‘a’ with an ‘o’, so the stemmed ‘a’ was favoured.
Basically, the two types of ‘a’ have popped in and out of fashion and common use for, arguably, thousands of years. We now tend to see the double storey in typefaces and the single storey in handwriting – for clarity and ease, respectively. I guess this is a simple case of function over form, complicated by the fact the form itself is, in fact, also the function. Isn’t it?
I haven’t even started on the looptail ‘g’.
