I realized the other day that all of the vowels in the English language are in odd positions in the alphabet (even if you count ‘y’ as a vowel). If you label the letters a,b,c,… as 1,2,3,…, then a,e,i,o,u,y are, respectively, 1,5,9,15,21,25. Quite a nice little progression.
This suggests that we could throw out all of the even letters of the alphabet, and still have an interestingly rich set of letters to work with: a,c,e,g,i,k,m,o,q,s,u,w,y. We could then define an “completely odd word” (or “COW” for short) as a word that only uses this subset of the alphabet. There so many COWs, like ACE, QUICK and SEQUOIA, that the mind boggles (sorry — couldn’t resist).
The word COW is itself a COW, oddly enough. I wonder what kind of speeches could be written using nothing but COWs. I guess a speech with nothing but COWs might be called a “maximally odd oration”, or a “MOO”.