Originally Posted By: Faldage
You might face the wrath of Geoff Pullum. He'll come down on you with both feet and a prepositional bush.


But it seems to me that, protests of the academic linguistic world notwithstanding, most people in normal spoken or written English are pretty comfortable using the word "consonant" to refer directly to written letters of the alphabet.
-Craig Russell (from your link)

1. An alphabetic or phonetic element other than a vowel; an elementary sound of speech which in the formation of a syllable is combined with a vowel. Applied both to the sounds and to the letters (the latter being the historically prior use).
 [OED2]

-joe (bring it on, Geoff) friday