When challenged to name these two letters ("C" and "G"), my daughter, now just three years old, looked me squarely in the eye and said firmly, "I call them both 'C'." It is not that she could not discriminate their shapes: she regularly performs perfectly on an uppercase letter-matching game on the computer. Nor is she unaware that I like to call these letters by different names: her answer was clearly intended to preempt the correction that she knew I would produce.

But she has a point. In what reasonable kind of world would people agree to call a dachshund and a St. Bernard "dogs" while calling one of these characters a "C" and the other a "G"? To us, the answer is obvious: in the kind of world where people use "C's" and "G's" discriminately for reading and writing--which, of course, she does not yet do.

--Marilyn Jager Adams