Every time you speak or write a word, you use a vowel (unless you're Welsh, they apparently donated all their vowels to Hawaii), often more than one. It's impossible to form a cohesive sentence in English without using a slew of them. And now I'm going to rate them.

A: One of two vowels that can stand alone as a word all by itself, it's also the second most used letter in the English language. It's also misused, especially in place of 'of.' There's a restaurant downtown called Piece A Cake, which looks totally idiotic. It's supposed to be Piece Of Cake, or maybe even Piece O' Cake. I wouldn't have a problem with that. Even if 'of' gets lazed down to 'a' with our lackadaisical pronunciations, phonetic spelling generally looks really Bad.

E: Now here's a vowel that does more than its fair share of work. Not only does it do its own job, it also backs up a lot of other vowels when they need a little help, which seems to be quite often, plus it often works in pairs. This all adds up to make E the most commonly used letter in English. Sure, it might be one of the most complicated letters to print, what with four separate lines and all those right angles, but it's a versatile, handy, and an all around Good letter.

I: The other vowel that can be a word unto itself (but only when capitalized) has become one of the most overused letters, thanks largely to the good people at Apple (and their iMac, iBook, and iPod, but that's another rant for another day). It's also among the simplest letters to print, right up there with lower case L. This can present some difficulties, though, as an upper case I looks much like a lower case L, especially if you don't bother putting the top and bottom on the I, which I generally don't do. The resemblance with the numeral one is also entirely too close. Things that can be confused with other things are generally Bad.

O: I want to clarify something. 'O' is not a word. 'Oh' is. See the difference? Sure, I know that my own nation's anthem is "O Canada" but I'm sticking to my guns here. O as a word is just lazy. It's just as bad as OK instead of Okay. That aside, O is a decent letter. Easy to write, not particularly pretentious, and you can't spell 'cookie' without using two of them. For that matter,it also requires two Os to spell Good.

U: While everyone should know that 'U' is not an actual word, that doesn't spot people from using it in place of 'you.' That's right Britney, I'm talking to you. And to your songwriters, because it's not like you actually wrote the lyrics to "I'm A Slave 4 U." This goes for you too, Sinéad O'Connor. And you, Prince. Not only is U not a word, but there are so many words already that pronounce the same (or very similarly), such as you, hue, yew, ewe, hew, and Hugh. I'm going to go with my rating that starts with U, and call it Ugly.

Y: I don't entirely understand this letter. It's sometimes a vowel, and sometimes it's not. Do we particularly need to have switch-hitting letters? There's 26 of them, and as it is C is stealing work from S and K, and X is almost entirely unneccessary, so why does Y do double duty? At least no one generally tries to use Y as a standalone word. That's Good.