A few weeks ago I was passing the time by trying to glean a pattern from the letters that are often paired with “J” for nicknames (BJ, RJ, DJ, CJ). You might think it’s the “Eeeeee” sound, but a) that’s probably the most common characteristic for letters of the alphabet, period; b) then you get to “MJ”
(And if you’re quicker on the uptake/more systematic than I am, you…get to “AJ first”)
Let’s see:
“A” and its rhymers: AJ, JJ, KJ,
“B” and its rhymers: BJ, CJ, DJ, EJ, PJ, TJ, (VJ?)
In their own categories:
MJ
OJ
RJ
Haven’t heard/can’t really imagine plausibly: FJ, GJ, HJ, IJ, NJ, QJ, SJ, UJ, WJ, XJ, YJ, ZJ
I’ve heard LJ but mostly as a nickname for someone with two first names/compound first name, and more on the internet as shorthand rather than spoken aloud. I don’t think I’ve ever met or read about a VJ, but it sounds natural to me. That may be primarily because I’m used to hearing Vee-Jay, like MTV VJ, as a title, or because of the name Vijay, even though the stress (and sound of the first syllable) is different.
So WHY don’t we hear the ones we don’t hear? (And I’m sure they exist in small numbers–I think there’s an author who’s SJ something–but for my own limited purposes I’m terming these “highly uncommon” in comparison to DJ and MJ and their ilk)
Some of them are easy to reconcile: UJ, QJ, XJ, YJ, and ZJ are not going to be common because U, Q, X, Y, and Z names are already less common. There’s a smaller pool to draw from even before nicknames come into play.
GJ is hard to say because phonetically, “Gee” starts with a “j” sound (I need an IPA keyboard…). WJ is easy to explain; W has more than one syllable, making it a poor partner. IJ sounds funny because the letters are already adjacent in the alphabet.
That leaves us with FJ, HJ, and NJ. You could argue that HJ doesn’t sound that different from AJ, which is true, and that therefore we should meet HJs more often (I just realized that doesn’t quite sound right, but then, look at how many people/stores are named BJ). I would be willing to venture, though, that there’s something about the “chuh” sound at the end of pronouncing the letter H that makes it more difficult to move directly on to the juh sound of the J. FJ? I guess you could make a similar, but weaker argument about transitioning from the “ph” at the end of F to the juh.
NJ, though? Nothing, phonetically, seems to really distinguish it from MJ. So…why don’t I know more NJs? (Not that I know handfuls upon handfuls of MJs, but I know of a few).
This post is titled “Big ABCs” because initially I was thinking about which letters are most frequently paired with “Big,” as in “The Big C” (both TV show and, minus “The,” a grocery store in Bangkok) or similar. I think I came up with real-life examples for A, B, C, D, J, L, and O). Maybe they comprise, unsurprisingly, the same letters that are most often paired with J, and those are just the favored alphabet pieces for any task?
