It’s a number of years now since the prolific, doll-like, callipygous rock star Prince, in a fit of pique with his record company, deposed himself and became Squiggle, the artist formerly known as Prince. Ex-Prince just celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday – assuming he still has birthdays – and you may have wanted to call and congratulate him. But who would you ask to speak to? And how would you greet him in a casual encounter – at the news stand, say, or the launderette? What’s the correct form of address for a Formerly? In this age of boundless celebrity it’s not just an issue of protocol; it’s a far-reaching question about the relation between the written and the spoken word.

Discussions of Ex-Prince are bedeviled by jokey periphrasis. ‘Sir Hieroglyphicford’ and ‘AFKAP’ are the uneasy ways in which he is referred to in a recent profile in Q (a music magazine whose own single-letter moniker is a mystery). Prince’s employees, Q reports, just call him ‘Boss’. It must have been a trying conversation for the guy from Q. In the account of the interview his Bossiness is mostly either silent or monosyllabic. He says he changed his name ‘on the advice of his spirit’. But he does not give voice to the enigmatic symbol, nor provide any guidance on how it should be pronounced.

A singer with a strange device

Unlike Duke Ellington, say, or Count Basie, Prince was given the name ‘Prince’ by his parents. So in this sense, at least, he is born royal. The half-mocking appropriation of such titles by the American jazz aristocracy holds no special allure for him. Could it be that what he’s aspiring to now is more like godhead – a name too sacred to be spoken? And while we’re at it, what is the origin of ex-Prince’s strange typographical device? Does it hold a clue to his putative divinity? Is it an ideogram, a translation of his former name into a language that only he knows? When communicating with him, should we be ready to substitute the device for other occurrences of the same word – referring, for example, to The Little Squiggle, by the artist formerly known as Oscar Wilde? Or The Squiggle, by the civil servant formerly known as Niccolò Machiavelli? The Squiggle and the Showgirl? Hamlet, Squiggle of Denmark?

From top to bottom: The Chinese symbol zao; Prince’s hieroglyph; vèvè of the Vodun divinity Ezili

Take a closer look at the princely hieroglyph. Perhaps it’s derived from the Chinese character zao, which signifies that time of day when the sun has risen to the height of a man’s helmet. Or could it be referencing a Haitian vèvè, symbol of one of the astral beings invoked in Vodun ceremonies, which is customarily traced on the ground in front of an altar using coffee grounds, or flour, or – on occasion – gun powder. Alternatively, might it be an image of a crop circle, scanned into the Paisley Park database and shrunk to type size?

On close examination, the device appears to consist of the biological female symbol elongated and overstruck with what could be either a half-uncurled post horn, or a tiny reptile, perhaps a chameleon, its tail rolled and mouth agape. The significance of this superimposition – let us speculate – could lie in the overstrike itself, that is to say, to employ a post-modern idiom, it could be an emblem of hybridization and complexity, the dense concatenation of the present.

Some digital fontographer has certainly had a hand in the creation of the device. Its precursors are to be found in the spray-can calligraphy of the New York subway – a living tradition of folk art with its origins in 1970s hip-hop culture, the milieu which, it is generally agreed, is ex-Prince’s chief musical and visual influence. The pioneer graffiti artists of the Lexington Avenue Express – culture heroes of that time – worked under constantly changing pseudonyms. Futura 2000, Poet, Crasher and Taki 183 were all type designers in the making. Their scribbled tags and megadoodles generated a range of fonts that has been called Wild Style, a diverse and sometimes whimsical collection united mainly by indecipherability.

The Wild Style font family included hyperbolically overstretched bubble writing, a version of Black-letter Gothic wreathed in flames, and a fractured lapidary font that rejoiced in the name ‘Earthquake’. And the most spectacularly dysfunctional and hard-to-read of all: Fifth-dimensional Step Parallel Staircase, illegible to all but cognoscenti. The subway artists, like Prince himself, aspired to mystery; their inscriptions were overlaid on each other until they became too dense to read; the letters themselves were twisted and bent to the point of unreadability, versions of the Roman alphabet approaching the condition of Linear B.

Digital fontographers of tomorrow

Now these tag artists are likely working for Adobe, designing the webfonts of tomorrow. Certainly the typographical conventions of electronic documents, with their wingdings and dingbats and emojis, are beginning to generate the same problem as writing about Prince – that is to say, a problem of epic unpronounceability. These are symbols without known phonological referents. The smiley face that once graced lapel badges, and tabs of Ecstasy, has migrated, with its derivatives, into the electronic universe, forming part of the grammar of the chat room. How do you say (:- or :- aloud? Should you ask a voice-synthesising program to do it for you?

Under the influence of emojese the English language is becoming increasingly ideogrammatical. Could we now be in danger of becoming so glyphed-out that our prose transforms itself into something that cannot be spoken by humans at all? Will English become a language at home only on the screen – where few read aloud – and increasingly strange when read from the page, in the medium formerly known as print? ★