Definition
Like Chinese characters, each letter in our alphabet began with a picture or drawing of an animal, person, or object that eventually became a symbol with little resemblance to the original object depicted. No one is sure what these pictographs represented originally, but scholars have made some educated guesses. A probably represented the horns of an ox, drawn first as a V with a bar across it like the bar in A. This may have been suggested by early plowmen guiding oxen by lines attached to a bar strapped across the animal's horns.
Adulterers were forced to wear the capital letter A as a badge when convicted of the crime of adultery under an American law in force from 1639 to 1785. Wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in his story "Endicott and the Red Cross" (1838): "There was likewise a young woman, with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children … Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread; so that the capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or anything rather than Adulteress." Hawthorne, of course, also wrote about the A of adultery in his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850).Perhaps only UGH! has been deemed by dime novels and Hollywood to be more representative of American Indian speech than the omission of a as an article. Willa Cather made an interesting observation on this American Indian habit (and there is no telling how widespread the habit really was) in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927): "'Have you a son?' 'One. Baby. Not very long born.' Jacinto usually dropped the article in speaking Spanish, just as he did in speaking English, though the Bishop had noticed that when he did give a noun its article, he used the right one. The customary omission, therefore, seemed a matter of taste, not ignorance. In the Indian conception of language, such attachments were superfluous and unpleasing, perhaps."
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