if someone asked me "what are the letters of

if someone asked me "what are the letters of the alphabet, but you can't list them in alphabetical or reverse-alphabetical order" I'd be in trouble

the way I remember "the alphabet" , like most things that people remember, is as a chain - it's not stored whole, it's a-b-c-d-e-f... - that's one of the reasons that it's a challenge to recite the alphabet backwards, either you need enough mental ram to visualize it and run it backwards or do what I do and just keep speedrunning to the end of the chain while storing "where you were"

the solution as far as I could tell would just be to cheat and be like "technically if I swap the first two letters, it's not alphabetical order but still valid" - bacdefg... like, so long as I can still exploit the chain in my head it can be made to work, but the idea of trying to pull random letters out of that set while still being confident I hit 'em all? impossible

another valid chain I can run in my head is swapping every pair of letters: b-a-e-c-f-e-h-g-j-i-l-k... but again, that's just exploiting "keep the chain in memory but do an easy in-place transformation on it"