L, a minnow, P

2.5 Years:
“What’s a minnow?”
“A small fish.”
“L, a minnow, P Q R S T U V…”

There’s a rite of passage marked by the moment a child realizes that L-M-N-O-P is not one letter. It tends to occur some time after the child discovers that the moon follows him everywhere he goes, and before he finds out that Lightning McQueen is not real. It is followed by years of similar misunderstandings and mispronunciations—“liver tea and justice for all,” “cereal killers,” “”lack toast and tolerance,” and so on—that last for years, or, for those poor unfortunate souls who still say “taking it for granite” at thirty, decades.

Of all the misunderstandings when it comes to the English language, I don’t think that any is more universal than the combination of L-M-N-O-P into one sound. Before kindergarten, I myself thought that there was a letter called “a lemon,” and that it was followed by O and P. I’ve known more than a few children who have believed that “ellameno” was a fancy version of the letter P, or was a letter in and of itself. But that one precise moment comes in every child’s life when the sounds split up, and, as if by magic, they turn into five different letters with five different sounds. It’s just one more unsung milestone that the parenting books forgot to include on the list.