Pizza, Liquor, and Slower Traffic Keep Right

If someone knows what connects the items in today’s post title without reading the rest of the post, I will be impressed. Hint: the answer is not some new form of travelling party. Further hint: I did not randomly select three items so that I could imagine my 3.5 followers frantically searching for an answer that would solve not only my question, but also all the mysteries of the universe.

What really does connect pizza, liquor, and a traffic sign? They’re all words you might see while driving around, and the first two are especially welcome when you get thirsty you’re playing the alphabet game. According to Google, this is apparently an actual road trip game, but my brother and I made up our own rules as we played. The basic premise of the game is to find all the letters of the alphabet in order while in the car, usually while on the way to some exotic vacation locale like Vermont. We used road signs, license plates, anything outside the car was fair game unless it was attached to your arm (i.e., holding a book outside the window was not only against the rules, but a good way to risk dismemberment).

We also didn't play the version where the letter has to be the first letter of the word, plus we didn't yell out the letters as we found them. This led to conversations such as “Which letter are you on?” “Which letter are you on?” “I asked you first.” “N.” “WHERE DID YOU FIND A J?” Seriously, though. There are no J’s on road signs. As long as people are hungry, thirsty, and are selling old stuff, you’re all set for Z’s (plaza, pizza) and Q’s (liquor, antiques), and X’s aren't even rare on the highway, but I don’t remember the last time I saw juglandaceous on a road sign. Oh wait. That would be never.

To get an idea of how uncommon the letter J is when travelling, based on a listing of USGS maps, there are 1061 towns in New York. Seventeen of them start with J. Two others contain the letter J. That’s 1.79 percent. X shows up seventeen times, but if you’re on the highway, you don’t need X; even if the next exit is 57 miles away, at least it’ll show up at some point. If you’re not on the highway, you’re probably also not passing through Java, NY, population 2,057 as of the 2010 census, so you’re most likely still stuck at J anyway.

At this point, you may be thinking that I’m awfully worked up about a game I used to play with my brother when I was ten. You’d be right, but it gets better. Not only did we go through the alphabet a good half dozen times on long car rides, but we also made up a complex system of power ups including one that allowed you to skip over letters and one that let you save a letter – so if you happened to see a J but were only on G, when you got to J you could go straight on to K. There were discussions about whether you could only save one letter per alphabet cycle or if you could only have one letter saved at a time (so if you saved a J, after passing J you could then save a Q). Sometimes we played only uppercase or lowercase letters. Sometimes we had both going at the same time. I’m pretty sure we did the alphabet backwards a few times. This was a serious game.

The whole reason I was thinking about the alphabet game was thanks to the six to seven hour bus rides I take between Cornell and home. After trying to write on a bus for a couple hours, you start looking for other forms of entertainment. And so, that’s how I came to remember the alphabet game and yes, I made it through the alphabet a couple times on my way back to Cornell after fall break. That’s how I know there are still no J’s on road signs.