I'm not a big fan of electronic toys. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by those LED sports games--we had a couple different football games, a baseball game and this really weird tennis game. Those of you old enough to remember this stuff know that the entire visual display of these games consisted of dots, dashes or, if the game was really advanced, static pictographs of the action. These things forced me to imagine that a red dash cycling from left to right on my screen really meant "he...could...go...all...the...way!" They were kinda fun, but as soon as computer games actually allowed much more realistic representations of games (including team management), I left those flashing gizmos in the dust.

Thing is, manufacturers still make the equivalent of "flashing red dash" games for babies and toddlers. They're selling the notion that a lot of noise and a lot of light will somehow make kids smarter. It seems to work; most of the kids that my son Max hangs out with have a plethora of screeching toys.

Max received a couple electronic toys for his birthday. The first is a Fisher-Price animal train. Most of the stuff is non-electronic, but if you put a figure on the engineer's seat, the engine plays a song called "Talk to the Animals." I'm not familiar with this piece, but since F-P included copyright information in the instructions, I'm assuming that it's vaguely well-known among the diaper set. And if Barbara or I take out the batteries, the toy still rolls and carries the animals and holds the same appeal for Max.

Then there's "Alphabet Pal." Alphabet Pal is made by LeapFrog. It's hard to forget that fact, since every time you leave the thing alone for 10 seconds it chirps "Thanks for playing with LeapFrog. Bye bye!" before putting itself into sleep mode. In any case, Alphabet Pal is a purple caterpillar with 26 legs. The foot on each leg is emblazoned with a letter of the alphabet. The legs alternate in color; first red, then yellow, then green, then blue and then red once more. If you pull on Alphabet Pal's leash, the thing will squeak the "ABC" song. If you press the bug on Alphabet Pal's back, then only the music will play. The instrumental is by far the preferable version.

There are four basic play modes: letter names, letter sounds, colors and songs. These are pretty self-explanatory. If you press a leg, then Alphabet Pal will say the name of the letter, make the sound of the letter (all vowels are short), say the color of the leg or play the music for a song (which often corresponds to the letter struck; if you hit G, it plays "Greensleeves").

I'm not sure this toy is particularly educational, but I don't think it hurts anyone, either. Max isn't really old enough to appreciate the differences between the letters, but he does enjoy throwing Alphabet Pal and waiting to hear what song it will play (this is dependent upon which leg the thing crashes).

I, on the other hand, have tried out all of the functions. And I've discovered something odd. Alphabet Pal won't say everything you want it to say. There are certain letter combinations that Alphabet Pal won't say in the "letter sounds" mode. If you hit the letters in the prohibited order, the bug giggles and says "That tickles!"

I first noticed this when I was trying to see if the thing would actually combine letter sounds if you hit two legs at once. I tried A and Z. All I got was that damned "That tickles!" routine. I figured the thing said that if you mashed down multiple legs at once. Further experimentation proved this hypothesis false. The processor is sensitive enough to tell that one leg is pressed a millisecond before or after another one, and it immediately replaces whatever sound is playing with the one corresponding to the most recent leg pressed. I soon figured out that A-Z simply is not allowed. Neither is A-S. Or S-X. Or S-E-X, for that matter, though E-X is perfectly fine.

Once I made this startling discovery, I raided my vast knowledge of slang and obscenity to see what Alphabet Pal's programmers had decided to block.

For starters, all racial and ethnics slurs I can think of are allowed. I went through about 50, and Alphabet Pal cheerfully dished each of them out . Then I turned to the seven words that used to be banned from television. F-U-C and F-U-K are banned. P-I-S is as well, as are T-I-T, C-O-C-K (or C-O-K) and S-U-C-K (or S-U-K). D-A-M is banned for good measure, though D-A-R-N and D-A-N-G are fine. Y-U-K (or Y-K or Y-U-C) also is not allowed. Most amusing, I found that F-A-G and L-E-Z (or L-E-S) are also banned, though Q-U-E-E-R, G-A-Y, L-E-S-B-I-A-N and H-O-M-O are fine (H-O-M-O-S-E-X-U-A-L hangs up on the "sex" part of that word, and D-Y-K-E gets stuck on the "yk" segment).

I'm curious. Did the first version of Alphabet Pal allow all letter sound combinations to be played, only to find out that some parents were unhappy when their precious tot would accidentally pound out something they heard Mommy say during the changing of a diaper? Or did the company actually come up with a list of sounds to block as part of the development of the toy?

As a person who works with language, I'm a bit disturbed whenever someone decides to eliminate supposedly "unwanted" words from the common vocabulary. More to the point, these people are supposedly creating educational toys, and so they should have at least one child psychologist on staff. Anyone who has spent any time with kids (much less actually gotten a degree in kid shrinking) will tell you that taking something away from a child simply makes the child more curious about whatever it is you want to hide. Look what I did when I figured out that Alphabet Pal was holding out on me.

Alphabet Pal isn't the sort of toy I'd give a kid. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone who's read many of my columns, Barbara and I are much more likely to give something like a size 1 soccer ball as a first birthday present. But even though Alphabet Pal isn't my kind of toy, I'll let Max play with it. I can't wait to see what happens when he figures out that Alphabet Pal won't always say what he tells it to say. If such truculence on the part of the purple caterpillar causes its premature demise, well, I won't have any choice but to give Max a big high five.

Jon Worley's carpal tunnels aren't feeling so hot after he punched Alphabet Pal's legs a few thousand times.