“W”

“Why allyuh human beings like to complexify and complicate-ify things so?"

Mack is back. The nightmare begins/resumes.

“Why are you coming to complexify and complicate-ify my life?”

“Let’s start with the Greeks: alpha, beta, gamma, delta.”

(“O God! Where he going with this now???”)

“Two-syllable words. Relatively simple enough. And people seem to like them. They all over the place: space travel, armed forces, varsity houses …”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah! Get on with it, nah!?”

“Then they throw in some three-syllable words: omega, omicron, epsilon, rubicon …”

“Rubicon is not a Greek letter!!”

“Just making sure you’re paying attention.”

“(Exasperated expulsion of air)”

“So they complexify their alphabet. See where I’m going?”

“I’m looking for a one-syllable letter right now to tell you where to go!”

“Oh! Ah-ha! They do have some one-syllable letters, like mu, nu, pi, rho …”

“Listen! I doh have all day!”

“It’s night-time, Old Man …”

“(Groan …)”

“Anyways, the French and the Spanish tried to simplify things somewhat, but the English were acing it.”

“Acing what?”

“The single-syllable alphabet.”

“Dis is what you invading my space for??”

“Yes. Because I have the same problem as you.”

“Oh?”

“Indeed, Sir. The English were doing really nicely – you know, ‘a’, ‘bee’, ‘cee’, ‘dee’ … until they arrived at the 23^rd letter.”

“The ‘w’?”

Indeed, Sir.”

“Oh. The three-syllable thing.”

“Indeed, Sir. They complexify and complicate-ify the whole thing. But it’s not just the three-syllable thing; It’s how you have to wrap up your mouth to pronounce the letter.”

“But that’s just ‘double-u’.”

“Easy for you to say. You ever listen to how people say it?”

“Not really.”

“So you never hear people say ‘dubber-you’ or ‘dub-ya?’

“Never paid attention.”

“Almost evvvvverybody does it. And then they came up with the clincher: double-u, double-u, double-u!”

“Oh. Okay. I see.”

“So everybody going, ‘dubber-you, dubber-you, dubber-you’ or ‘dub-ya, dub-ya, dub-ya’. Nobody getting the pronunciation right!”

“And I suppose you, Sir, have a plan in mind to solve that global crisis, right?”

“Precisely! Same way you have ‘bee’, ‘cee’, ‘dee’, and ‘gee’, you could have ‘wee’.”

“And that would be spelt ‘double-u, double-e,’ right?”

“(Groan …)”