Alan Connor explores what letters of the alphabet mean in cryptic crossword clues. This week, he talks to the voiced velar stop, better known as G

You've met A, B, C, D and E and F; now let's see what G gets up to in crosswords...

Thanks for talking to us, G. How are you today?

I'm good, Alan. In fact, I'm grand - two words there you'll find in clues to indicate a G in the answer. That's "grand" as in "it'll cost you ten Gs".

Another common one is 'government'...

Yeah, government like the G-Men: the Feds in cool 50s movies. But I also play hard - in the Nato alphabet, I'm golf. Do you play, Alan? Fancy a round?

No - I, er... have misgivings about monoculture. But that's not important. You sound on top of the world.

I am the world, Alan. Global. G7, G8, G20... when you see G, you know something big is going down.

You seem to have even more grandeur and, well, braggadocio than C.

Why are you talking about C? G is nothing like C. We don't even look alike. G; C. C; G. See?

I guess. Now, despite all those '-ing' words which setters should think about if an answer ends with a G, you're the 17th most frequent letter...

Sure, but I make a lot of noise, or rather noises. Hard G like in Gabon, soft G like in George, and then there's the weird foreign words like rouge and beige. The French have never really got their heads around me. In their alphabet, they say "G" as "J" and "J" as "G". Je ne sais pas pourquoi.

Moi non plus. Let's talk about when a solver has got a G at the beginning of an answer. Probably an L or an R comes next, unless it's a vowel. Then, the solver should be thinking about a J sound if you come before E, I or Y - the same vowels that change the sound of a C.

There you go again, Alan: likening me to C.

But, I mean, you are pretty similar. In words like 'fresco', or 'periscope', C even starts to sound like you.

Hold it right there. What is your obsession with C?

No, G. I think the question is: what's your obsession with C?

All right, C stole my spot. OK? Happy now? Stole my identity, my whole life. I used to be the third letter of the alphabet, you know.

'I' was the third letter of the alphabet?

No, no: I was. I mean, G. Although I used to look like an I: I was a throwing stick or something, but that's not important. The Etruscans realised that they never used a "gee" noise and put a K sound in my place, which all ended up with ABC instead of ABG like it used to be and ought to be. The gall of those Etruscans!

So you just went missing?

For 500 years, Alan. Can you imagine a world without G? No gravity to keep you grounded. The legend goes that a freed Roman slave, one Spurius Carvilius Ruga, founded Rome's first school of grammar and rediscovered me - and put me in seventh place like I'm supposed to say "thank you Spurius". And you wonder why I make a big noise now? I have to. It's a matter of survival. What happened in Tuscany could happen again.

I guess you're kinda happy just to be alive.

Yeah, I'll take anything going. In science, I'm grammes, Gauss, giga - even conductance and acceleration. It's all good. VG, as they say.

One last thing: you must have been happy when they named the G-spot.

Of course - only it's a bit of a reminder of what happened to me in 700BC. Hard to find, people questioning whether you exist at all - or need to. I gotta go, but it's odd to think that the guy - he was a guy, not a girl - who claimed to have discovered the G-spot couldn't actually say it. Ernst Gräfenberg was German and I don't know if you've ever asked a German where they come from: they say something like "Tchermany". Tch!