You can’t SUCCEED, PROCEED, or even ENTER without it! Yes, the lowly E is NEEDFUL, REQUIRED — the KEYSTONE, EVEN, for most English words.
Fans of cryptograms can tell you that the letter E, and the combo of
are the first things they look for when setting out to solve the puzzle.
That said, did you know “English” started out milleniums ago meaning a fishhook?
The Angles, a West Germanic people who immigrated to the British Isles, hailed from the Angul district of Schleswig, which is just south of modern Denmark. Their homeland, part of the Jutland peninsula, was shaped somewhat like a fishhook so its inhabitants used their word for fishhook to refer to their country. When they sailed across the sea they brought this name along, plus the words angler and angling. They weren’t the only Germanic people who came and decided to stay; the squeezed-out locals tarred them all with the same brush: Anglo-Saxons.
An Ethnic Legend:
We have a friend whose parents immigrated to Canada from Denmark. When she was young, her father told her that the original inhabitants of Britain couldn’t talk; their only communication was grunts and squeaks. He claimed the Angles were the ones who taught the British how to talk. I’m not sure where he learned this bit of history, but we took it with a grain of sea salt.
Christine's Collection 
Being the most used letter, it comes in very handy when I’m doing my codeword puzzles every day – in fact, I’ll be doing one Erelong!
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Thanks for your comment. I’m very fond of Codewords, too, and I always try to determine the E before anything else.
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I think Professor Higgins of MY Fair Lady fame would be likely to agree that the English couldn’t speak:
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Now I want to watch the movie again!
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I know. I actually have it set aside 🙂
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Lovely!
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English is a language that seems to morph into a new accent every 25 miles or so, except in London, where it’s every three or four miles. We once had a Cockney neighbour and were hard put to understand him. 🙂
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It’s very interesting to me that in isolated parts of Appalachia, which were settled by Scots and Englishmen, the accent is very close to the original ones because there has been very little contact with the outside world.
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What really interests me is the Vance history in those parts. I googled Jim Vance (my brother) one day just for fun — and found out the Hatfields were Vances. Anson Hatfield’s mother and grandmother were both Vances; Jim Vance was his uncle. Our Vance ancestors hail from Gallowayshire in Southwestern Scotland. Which hasn’t much to do with the language, but anyway… 🙂
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How interesting 🙂
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I got to play the part of Eliza in our high school play when I was a senior. Not the musical, but the original play, “Pygmaliion.” I think I got the part mostly because I could do a pretty good imitation of that cockney accent 🙂
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I think you need more than a grain of salt to buy that ethnic legend!
Fun one, Christine.
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Yes, I think. But it made him happy, 🙂
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😀
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Well, maybe second – after we cryptogrammers look for single letter words. It can only be a or I, after all!
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True. Thanks for your comment.
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