Well, I like Cs and Ks both, so I don’t think that’s influencing my preferences. I like writing large dramatic ones. That’s adorable that your students got mad at C! Perhaps if you had showed them “C is for Cookie” they would have been mollified. :p

I have to say I’m partial to Katherine with a K. Ks, I’ve found, are much more fun to write. Plus I’ve developed a strong anti-C bias. I blame teaching preschool for this, actually. It was difficult trying to explain to my students without confusing them that in fact the letter C makes two different sounds that are already made by two other letters and that really the only time it makes a unique sound is when it’s paired with an H. It’s ridiculous when you think about it. They were, as it turns out, quite indignant about the whole thing and accused the letter C of stealing the K and S sounds.

I like “Katya” too – I think I had a character called Katya in a story I wrote when I was quite a bit younger.

You aren’t doing it wrong, there’s no wrong one. It’s just your preference, and it probably never matters unless you’re compiling an index or writing a dictionary. When I’m editing an index for work, I don’t change the kind of alphabetization being used. I just make a note of it so I can ensure that it’s consistent throughout the index.

The two kinds are word-by-word and letter-by-letter – the difference is that letter-by-letter ignores spaces and most punctuation and only stops alphabetizing after a comma or parenthesis. So in word-by-word alphabetization, “sea view” would come before “seascape”; but in letter-by-letter alphabetization, “seascape” would come first. But “sea, stormy” would come before both of those entries, in both kinds of alphabetizing.

Phew.

Darn that Katy Perry! Do what I do: Pretend she doesn’t exist. I can’t tell her apart from Zooey Deschanel anyway because they have the same face on their heads. Just pretend there’s only one of them and it’s always Zooey Deschanel. That Zooey Deschanel can wear some kooky outfits, and her fiance Russell Brand says lots of swear words. (See how easy it is?)

I guess your classes at school abided by the C/K rule when you were little? (Abided? Abode?) (Yay for the C spelling!)

I agree. Math and logic. Looking back, I wouldn’t be surprised if The Phantom Tollbooth and Through the Looking Glass were what put me on the road to studying philosophy.

That’s why I love Andrew Crumey’s Pfitz. It’s like those books, only more and different.

But I *am* one of those people who is hopeless at actually doing math, much as I love hearing how it works. I had a flat earth moment when I tried to do proofs in high school–staring out over a void beyond which my brain simply could not go. Do I get any points for being embarrassed about it?

Trapunto, maybe I only think that using the full name for “Katherine” or its variants is pretentious because I’ve lived so long in an academic community where mothers forbid people to use a shortened form of their child’s name–there are a lot of kids around here named something like “James” whose parents get mad if anyone calls the kid “Jim.”

And maybe I’m still reacting to my grandmother, who was reportedly unwilling to put my dad’s name–Jack–on the wedding invitations because “it’s a nickname.” No, it’s not “short” for John–it’s his actual name.