“What’s your least favorite letter?” Danny asked us at lunch.

We goggled.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s the opposite of when you were little, and everyone asked what’s your favorite this or that. I want your least favorite.”

“Letter?”

“Yeah. For example, mine’s ‘c’. Completely needless. You can do it with ‘s’ or ‘k.’ I mean, look at the word ‘circus,’ or ‘circum-anything.’ It’s crazy to have one letter make different sounds in the same word.”

“Like ‘Xerox,’” I said. “Make up your mind: pronounce it ‘x-erox’ or ‘zeroes.’”

“Okay, okay,” Andy was grinning. “What’s with ‘w?’ Why three syllables to say a letter, when all the others are just one?”

“Yeah,” I added. “Good old ‘www.’ It’s way shorter to say ‘world wide web.’”

“Or GSW,” Danny said. “‘Gun shot wound’ is only three syllables.”

“You can figure how those would develop,” Andy opined. “You see ‘www’ or ‘GSW’ on written stuff. You can’t pronounce them the way you can initials like ‘asap’ or ‘awol,’ so you start saying the letters. Even though what they signify is easier to pronounce. Funny …”

“I get you.” I thought, and continued, “I find writing ‘e’ tiresome. Unless you do it like a backwards ‘3,’ which seems affected, it takes too many pen strokes to make ‘E.’ And the letter is notoriously, boringly recurrent.”

“And I’m not crazy about ‘q,’” Andy said. “It’s as unnecessary as ‘c;’ we can do ‘qu’ with ‘kw.”

We all agreed.

“What about cursive capital ‘Q?’ It’s worse than the capitals ‘G’ or ‘S.’ It’s silly …” We stopped there, for then.