Good morning, John.  We got a question in the Dear Hank and John inbox.  Who's it from? It's from Debbie, and it's a question that I've been asking myself for decades now.  We can spell letters with letters, which is just....I don't know what that means but it just makes my brain go prrt, and how they are spelled is, of course, impacted by how they are pronounced, and there are ways that we have decided to pronounce them, and I'm gonna rank them now.

So first of all, coming in at number one, we have all the vowels.  They get to do whatever they want.  Coming in at number two, we have consonants that end in the 'ee' noise, so C, T, V, B.  You're all fantastic, this makes perfect sense.  Why don't we just carry it through the whole alphabet?  

A, you can do whatever you want.
B, C, D, E, Fee.
Fee?  Why not?  Why?  Why?  But okay, if we're gonna have another system, which it turns out we actually have to, because I'll get to that in a second, coming it at number three, we have the F, the M, the N, the S, where instead of coming at the beginning of the word, we decide we're gonna put the consonant at the end of the word, and I was thinking about this and I was--why can't we just switch all of these over to like, the B, C, D version and then I got to S, which if you do that with S, you get See.  Come on!

But there's another letter for which this is true, and that is number four, along with K, we have J.  J and K.  They do their own thing, and K could be kee, and that would be great, but J can't be gee, because we got a G.

And then we got this little island of misfit toys.  Letters that are not pronounced like any of the other letters, so coming it at number five, we're going with Q.  I feel like Q makes sense for it to be weird.  Like, I don't know that we need Q, like, we could just use other letters to do that, like kween, k-w-e-e-n.  

Then we have X, also is standing out here on its own because it shouldn't exist.  It's just ks.  Or Z, for some reason.  

And now we have approached our final three: the worst, clearly, the worst letter names.  Y, which could have been YEE.  And we just missed that!  Unacceptable, but not as bad as second-to-last, H?  Aich?  H doesn't even have the H noise in it, unless you're British and you say 'haich' which, great, good, obviously that's what we should do but that's not what we do, but, but, but H at least contains the letter H, right?  It's there at the end?  

But coming in absolute dead last, just despicable, we have the only three syllable letter, the only letter that references another letter.  The only letter that does not even contain itself.  W!?  It just describes its own shape, but poorly.  

Look, there's a reason why we ended up with W and spoiler, it's not a great reason.  It is, depending on how you count it, the youngest letter, and it arrived in its final form, after the invention of the printing press, and so it was named by printers who, before we had Ws, would just use two Us instead of a W to make the 'wuh' noise.  Like, we still have a word that does it!  Equus.  But why is a W a double V, Hank?  Well, because Vs and Us were, for a while, kind of interchangeable?  

I have a pet theory and there's nothing supporting this, that printers just had more Vs lying around because U's were more useful, so using two U's all the time would use up all of their U's.  And did I make the whole video so that I could say that line?  A little.  A little bit.  Yeah.  

John, it's the last day of the year when you can join the Awesome Socks Club at awesomesocks.club/vlogbrothers, or because V's and U's are interchangeable, awesomesocks.com/ulogbrothers.  

Be delighted by a new pair of socks designed by an artist every month of 2021 except if you sign up now, it will not be every month, it will be two pairs in February because we ran out of socks and so there will be delivered two pairs in February and then one every month after that, and know that all the profits will be going to decrease maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone.  You can sign up now or tell someone you love to maybe sign you up now at awesomesocks.club/ulogbrothers.

John, at the end of your last video, you asked "What's next?" and I love it and all I gotta say is, whatever it is, it ain't gonna be little.  I'll see you on Tuesday.