It was my Birthday on Saturday.
I know, bear with me…
…and, as you do, well, certainly as I do, I was looking deeply into that ever so familiar phrase Happy Birthday and being gently astonished at how many words you can make out of the word ‘birthday’.
From its eight letters you can definitely make up to 150 different words-and, if you’re genuinely up to Countdown standards, a total nearer to 200.
There are the obvious ones of course- hat, bat, raid, day, and longer ones like third, birth, and hairy.
There is also the delightfully obscure.
Dribaty for example. Drop that one in next time you play Scrabble.
Scrabble pedants might not let you get away with it as, strictly speaking, it’s a dialect word, found in old regional English (particularly Northern dialects), and best ‘translates’ as;
Damp, drizzly weather; wet and muddy conditions.
Now you know this, you can, next time you go outside and get wet say to your friends that, ‘…it’s an absolutely dribaty day today’.
Before feigning astonishment that they’re not as familiar as you with the glorious lexicon of the English language.
But I digress.
Look at the phrase we started with again.
Happy Birthday.
Two words. Thirteen letters-ten consonants, and only three vowels, one of which (‘a’) is repeated twice.
Now that got me really thinking.
(You’re now thinking of course, ‘…is that the most exciting thing he could find to do with himself on his birthday?’).
Yes. Yes it was. I’m a writer, remember. We’re on it 24/7.
Vowels and consonants.
Vowels in particular.
Why A, E, I, O, U? Why not B, H, K, Q, Z?
Well, because your lips would explode and your tongue would knot itself like a balloon animal if we tried building language that way.
Vowels are the breathy backbone of speech—the open sounds, the bits that give our words shape, rhythm, and sing-song.
Consonants are the noise-makers, the door-slamming, tongue-tapping, lip-smacking interruptions.
Without vowels, language would be a series of barks. Without consonants, it would sound like someone trying to hum while being politely drowned.
But how did those five letters get the starring role?
We can blame the Greeks. Or praise them, depending on how your day’s going.
Back in the day—way back—the Phoenicians had a perfectly serviceable consonant-only writing system. It was snappy, efficient, and made about as much sense to the uninitiated as a cat walking across a keyboard.
But the Greeks, always a bit showy and philosophical, decided this just wouldn’t do. They wanted something that could capture the flow of spoken language—its nuance, its breath, its life.
So they took some of those old Phoenician consonants they didn’t really need and gave them a makeover.
One of them, ‘aleph’, became Alpha. It didn’t have a consonant sound anymore. It just… opened. Like a mouth beginning to speak.
And that’s essentially what a vowel is: a mouthful of nothing. Or rather, a mouth open enough to let sound pass without obstruction. A for ahhh. E for eee. I for aye. O for oh. U for oooh. Pure sound, no interference. The soul of a word, where consonants are the scaffolding.
Of course, the Romans came along and pinched the Greek alphabet like a magpie with a shiny coin. They tinkered, as Romans liked to do, and by the time they’d finished, we had something remarkably close to the alphabet we use now. Vowels in their rightful place, looking smug and indispensable.
Each vowel plays its own little trick.
A is the grand opener. It can go from a flat Norfolk a in ‘cat’ to a more regal ‘ah’ in ‘father.’ Flexible. Democratic. Has range.
E is famously slippery. The most common letter in English, yet often silent—lurking at the end of ‘bake’ for example,” holding everything together like an invisible screw.
I is sharp and narrow. A bit uptight, maybe. It gives us ‘bit’, ‘fight’, and ‘identity’. You get the feeling it knows it’s important.
O is round, generous. Rolls off the tongue. It’s the vowel you use when you’re surprised or in love or ordering chips. Or doing other things. You know. Oooh Oooh Oooh etc.
U? U is the odd one. Sometimes it’s ‘uh’, sometimes ‘oo’ and sometimes it teams up with Q like a clingy best mate who can’t be left alone at a party.
And then there’s Y—the fifth (well, sixth, the Yoko-except more useful and not so likely to break up the party) Beatle of vowels. Not technically a full-time member, but when it shows up at the end of ‘happy’, we all pretend it’s part of the gang.
Why does any of this matter?
Because vowels do the heavy lifting.
They give us melody and pace. They hold a sentence together and keep us from sounding like someone’s thrown all those Scrabble letters (‘…you can’t have dribaty, there’s no such word’) up into the air at once.
Strip out the vowels from a sentence, and you’re left with a cryptic crossword clue.
Try it.
Wht s th pt f vwls?
It’s legible—but only just. It reads like a message from someone who’s trapped on a desert island with nothing but a Twitter account and no vowels left in their data plan.
So yes, salute the vowels.
They’re the breath between thoughts, the music in the noise…
…the bits that turn language from percussion into poetry.
