Willowwood Comments
Wonderful! I thought at first that it was going to be words with surprisingly few letters in them. I was going to write in and point out that your last name is particularly suitable for that sort of calculation, having two repeated letters and two very common vowels. In the course of making some stamped cards for your grandson, I noted that his name only has five letters in it that occur only once, and six that occur twice or more. This seemed striking to me until just now, when I wrote out Phil's name (4 that occur only once, all in his middle name, and seven that occur twice or more), and yours (five that occur only once and five that occur twice or more). Then I tried my maiden name to learn, to my surprise, that I have the fewest non-repeating letters of us all: only three, d, k, and s, plus eight letters occurring twice or more. I don't know what this all means, but I had fun messing about with it, & thought you'd enjoy it too. 
Curses-- I miscounted Phil. He has five non-repeating letters, too. And now that I write it out again, I think you only have four. But John has five. The whole thing makes my head hurt, but there must be some kabbalistic significance here somewhere...
Your meditations on the fun of spelling out words out loud has somehow reminded me of Victor Borge's routines where he read passages and pronounced the punctuation, as in this video on YouTube.
I seem to recall seeing him do this on Sesame Street or the Electric company or some such show back in the day . . .
Very nice! Glad to see that others can enjoy such word explorations! It is funny though, because listening to you spell them made me realize that I actually spell them, especially alfalfa, in a very different pattern!
I still can't believe all the time and energy we put into those spelling bees . . . for those who don't understand the intensity that these things can get to, I advise you to rent "Spellbound"!
Janice, we're going to have to get your version of spelling these words. If you record it, I'll be happy to post it!
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