"All fall down"

“A,B,C,D,E,F,G…echa…ucha…all fall down,” Izarra is enjoying her new composition. She is into remixing rhymes these days.

I read Chinese history. The first imperial dynasty is named Qin and the last Qing. I look up the country’s current map. Two neighbouring provinces are called Shanxi and Shaanxi. I give up on the Chinese.

Izarra, my two-year-old daughter, thinks English is weirder. The small purring animal in the courtyard is a cat while the orange pieces in her salad are called carrot. Lychee the favourite and chilli the repulsive is made of the same sounds. She has overcome a similar crisis by renaming the barking biting animal “gog” and the same-sized grass-eating animal “dot”.

Was she suggesting a linguistic breakdown when she remixed the alphabet with “Ring-a-ring o' roses”?