23 June: Q Day

Q-Day was 23 June 1945, the day of the dress rehearsal of the first atom bomb test. Nowadays it is sometimes used informally to mean "Quality Day", or the first day of the calendar quarter. 10 things you might not know about the letter Q:

1. It’s the ^17th letter in the English alphabet, and the second least frequently used, after Z.
2. The earliest forms of the letter may have been a symbol representing a knot, a threaded Needle, or a monkey with its tail hanging down.
3. It was common up until the 19^th century for some capital Qs to have longer tails. This is thought to have originated in Latin texts, where Q is much more likely to be the first letter of a word. They still used shorter tailed Qs, however, for shorter words. The long tailed Q fell out of use with the advent of digital fonts. One person who would have been glad to see the back of them was the American typographer D.B. Ukdike, who claimed that printers would use them simply to “outdo each other”.
4. The letter Q is usually followed by a letter U in the English language, but there are exceptions – according to Wikipedia, 4,422 of them to be exact. They are often obscure words which have been assimilated into the English language from other tongues such as Arabic, Chinese or French. For example, qigong (Chinese exercise system), qi (the Chinese word for the life force), qat (a shrub with narcotic properties) and cinq (the number five in a pack of cards.
5. The Estonian, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian, Turkish, Welsh and Cornish alphabets do not include the letter Q.
6. Q is the symbol for the Guatemalan quetzal, the currency of Guatemala.
7. In Medieval times, Q was sometimes included in the Roman numeral system and was used to represent 90, 500 or 500,000.
8. In the NATO phonetic alphabet, “Quebec” is Q. In Morse Code - –.- represents Q.
9. In Star Trek, Q is not only a character (played by John de Lancie) but the name of the race he belongs to, who all refer to each other as Q. They are the only race which can access the Q Continuum. Gene Roddenberry chose the letter Q for this character/race in honour of a friend, Janet Quarton.
10. Q is also a character in the James Bond novels and films. Q in this case stands for “Quartermaster” and is therefore a job title. In military usage a quartermaster is a senior officer who co-ordinates the distribution of supplies. In the James Bond universe, he’s the one who issues Bond with gadgets.

MY LATEST BOOK!

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book