main the same forever.

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