OBS. 14.—­If any change is desirable in our present names of the letters, it is that we may have a shorter and simpler term in stead of Double-u.  But can we change this well known name?  I imagine it would be about as easy to change Alpha, Upsilon, or Omega; and perhaps it would be as useful.  Let Dr. Webster, or any defender of his spelling, try it.  He never named the English letters rightly; long ago discarded the term Double-u; and is not yet tired of his experiment with “oo;” but thinks still to make the vowel sound of this letter its name.  Yet he writes his new name wrong; has no authority for it but his own; and is, most certainly, reprehensible for the innovation.[92] If W is to be named as a vowel, it ought to name itself, as other vowels do, and not to take two Oes for its written name.  Who that knows what it is, to name a letter, can think of naming w by double o?  That it is possible for an ingenious man to misconceive this simple affair of naming the letters, may appear not only from the foregoing instance, but from the following quotation:  “Among the thousand mismanagements of literary instruction, there is at the outset in the hornbook, the pretence to represent elementary sounds by syllables composed of two or more elements; as, Be, Kay, Zed, Double-u, and Aitch.  These words are used in infancy, and through life, as simple elements in the process of synthetic spelling.  If the definition of a consonant was made by the master from the practice of the child, it might suggest pity for the pedagogue, but should not make us forget the realities of nature.”—­Dr. Push, on the Philosophy of the Human Voice, p. 52.  This is a strange allegation to come from such a source.  If I bid a boy spell the word why, he says, “Double-u, Aitch, Wy, hwi;” and knows that he has spelled and pronounced the word correctly.  But if he conceives that the five syllables which form the three words, Double-u, and Aitch, and Wy, are the three simple sounds which he utters in pronouncing the word why, it is not because the hornbook, or the teacher of the hornbook, ever made any such blunder or “pretence;” but because, like some great philosophers, he is capable of misconceiving very plain things.  Suppose he should take it into his head to follow Dr. Webster’s books, and to say, “Oo, he, ye, hwi;” who, but these doctors, would imagine, that such spelling was supported either by “the realities of nature,” or by the authority of custom?  I shall retain both the old “definition of a consonant,” and the usual names of the letters, notwithstanding the contemptuous pity it may excite in the minds of such critics.

II.  CLASSES OF THE LETTERS.

The letters are divided into two general classes, vowels and consonants.