If you were anything like I was during your public school years — in other words, NOT one of those know-it-alls who accepted nothing less than an A — you were pretty happy when your teacher handed you back your corrected paper with a big red B on it. “Good enough,” I’d think, “especially for the amount of effort I put into it.”
Yes, B is just fine with me. What we know about the letter B’s origin is that it was part of the Phoenician alphabet more than 3,000 years ago in 1000 BCE. At that time, it didn’t look the same as it does now, but even then it made the same sound as it does today and was already second in the alphabet. The earliest form of the letter appears on the Moabite Stone dating from the ninth century BCE.
Early Greek forms of the letter gave way to intermediate Greek and Latin versions that were nearly identical to the modern B. In Hebrew it was called beth, bet, or bayt. Since some forms of the Hebrew symbol looked kind of like the floorplan of a house, “beth” came to mean “house,” and is often used in the names of synagogues and schools, such as “Beth Israel.”
In the Greek alphabet, the letter took on the name “beta,” and that word has remained in English and is used to refer to the second in any series. Beta also frequently refers to the version of a computer program or application shown to a small group of users before it’s available to the wider public. The rollout of this version is called beta testing.
In astronomy, the second brightest star in a constellation also assumes this name, as in Beta Centauri, which is runner-up in brightness to the better-known Alpha Centauri.
In English words, B is sometimes silent. This occurs particularly in words ending in MB, such as lamb and bomb, some of which originally had a B sound. The B in debt, doubt, subtle, and related words was added in the 16th century to give them an etymological spelling, so the words were more like their Latin originals (debitum, dubito, subtilis).
B is the seventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after V, K, J, X, Q and Z), appearing in only about 1.5% of our words. But that doesn’t mean that the alphabet’s second letter doesn’t have a lot to offer, oh no.
We’ve already touched upon the fact that getting a grade of B for your work was pretty good, but that’s far from the only thing our second-place friend is good for. For instance, back in the day it gave us the B movie that followed the main attraction of a double feature – you know, the one that often featured the studio’s second-tier B-list actors and actresses.
Without the letter B there’d be no supplemental B-roll video to support the dialogue in the making of newscasts, documentaries and such — or at least they’d have to call it something else. And what would we call the secondary song that filled up the B side of those old 45-rpm records we used to buy?
Represented by “Bravo” in NATO’s phonetic alphabet (and by a dash and three dots in Morse Code), B also stands for “billion” and the element “boron.” B is also the Air Force’s designator for bombers such as the B-1 Lancer (nicknamed “Bone” from “B-One”) and the aging B-52 Stratofortress.
And without B, we’d have to come up with a new name for those laid-back folks with type B personalities. You know, the ones on the B team with type B blood who always resort to implementing plan B and could maybe benefit from a few B vitamins.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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