MARK MY WORD: LIFE IS A BOWL OF ALPHABET SOUP FOR A 4-YEAR-OLD

B-U-G-S B-U-N-N-W. Becca, our 4-year-old, meticulously announced each letter as if it were an invited guest to a ball.

"What was that last letter?" I asked. Becca showed me the bottle of vitamins with Bugs Bunny on the label.

"That's a Y not a W," I advised her.

Welcome to Becca's spelling bee. She can't read yet, but she knows most of her letters.

You know she knows them because she constantly calls them out like numbers at a bingo game.

The other day, I pulled up to a stop sign. Becca immediately called out each letter: "S-T-O-P." I felt like I was in the middle of a game of Scrabble.

Fortunately, we only have to contend with 26 letters. The Egyptians had several hundred signs that stood for words or syllables, which made typing difficult.

Residents of Cyprus created a 56-sign alphabet, which kept kids spelling aloud well into their teens.

All this letter calling can be dangerous, my wife Joni pointed out the other day.

Joni and Becca were walking across the traffic lane in front of Schnucks, when all of a sudden Becca stopped dead in her tracks and started reading off the store letters on the huge supermarket sign.

This can be a real traffic stopper, particularly since speed reading is out of the question at her age.

Fancy type faces are still a mystery for Becca, but she is pretty good at spying out most letters.

Becca has known about "B" for a long time. But she always thought of it as a loner until now.

Becca has discovered letters are everywhere, not just in books. She is more interested in what's on the can of food than what's in it.

"F-A-T F-R-E-E," Becca read aloud from the front of a can of cheese balls.

When she starts reading "H-I-G-H I-N C-H-O-L-E-S-T-E-R-O-L" we'll have to start defacing all the food labels.

There are just some words you don't want to hear, particularly when spelled out one letter at a time.

According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, which has a whole alphabet to work with, Americans are eating four times as much Mexican food and three times as much popcorn and pretzels as they did 20 years ago.

Fortunately, for today's 4-year-olds, those foods haven't gained any extra letters.

A survey last year of 5,500 Americans (who weren't on a cruise ship) found that half ate no fruit on a given day.

Becca doesn't eat much fruit. But she can spell it.

Snack foods are big in her vocabulary. But she doesn't really know the word "vocabulary" because it is a "y" word.

"W" can be a problem, too. But it wasn't a problem before the Middle Ages when the alphabet was smaller and didn't take up the entire length of a chalkboard. Then, J, U and W were added so people could compete on "Wheel of Fortune."

When it comes to snack food, a few letters can go a long way.

The Snack Food Association estimates that the average American ate 22 pounds of salty snacks in 1994, up from 17.5 pounds in 1988. That's P-O-U-N-D-S and it's something you don't want spelled out.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.