‘Daddy, what does N-O-X-R spell?’ asks my son, without looking up from his paper. He’s drawing, as usual, a picture of his little sister. She is a large egg with two lines for legs (no arms) and a smile that bisects the entire width of her Humpty Dumpty face like a garotted Parisian aristocrat. His fascination with spelling is charming, if a little back to front. He never asks how words are spelled, preferring instead to list a random sequence of letters and ask what word they make: F-D-T-R or G-S-O-P or P-R-I-B.
Just once in all this time has he hit upon even an acronym, and for this reason he now knows more than any four-year-old really needs to about the Republic of South Africa, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Road Safety Authority. It is impossible to explain to him that this is an inefficient way of increasing his spelling knowledge, but some part of me thinks it keeps him more deeply engaged with letters and their uses than the other way round, so maybe it’s better. The sad fact is I don’t know, and that’s becoming more of a problem.
