"M will see you now, James."

Ah yes. The old bilabial nasal consonant we call “M”. The Hebrews, of course, called it “Mem”, and they pictured the letter as wavy water; so, for our purposes, perhaps the best way of thinking of M is like a dead W that has fallen from its perch on the sentence tree and is floating upside down in the alphabet river.
But then, to my mind anyway, M actually looks more like two bleak and inaccessible, snow-capped Alpine peaks with a steep, treacherous ravine between them. Or, perhaps, two of those viciously gabled Swiss ski chalets that always smell like rotting pine.
In Egyptian hieroglyphics, an owl represents M, so, for example, if a scribe wanted to inform his readership that his breakfast melon was especially delicious, rather than writing “Mmmmm”, he would draw a parliament of owls instead.
The owl, obviously, was the symbol of Athens, and then later the bird sacred to Minerva, whose Roman devotees scribbled down an M when they wanted to express the number we call “one thousand”, as in the following sentence:
“Oldus Macdonaldum, there are M owls nesting in your barn.”
Finally, and some might think most importantly, M is the title of one of the greatest motion pictures ever made: Fritz Lang, after all these years, still no cinematic peer.

Comments

[Outer Life]

I once knew a woman, an edgy black-clad downtown loft denizen, who changed her name to "M". I pointed out that once her siblings started reproducing, their children would call her Auntie M. I'd like to think that image of Kansas wholesomeness was sufficiently jarring to prompt her to add a few letters, but alas I lost track of M.