Ted MacNeil writes:
Even Hersley [sic] (the IBM lab that wrote & supports) CICS pronounces
it. Who should know
better?
and, Ted, if you're going to take positions on these niceties you must get
your facts right.
CICS is and has for long been maintained at Hursley with a 'u', but it was
not written there: It was written by three IBM SEs (in that long-ago time
when SEs wrote assembly language with facility) in the United States.
The notion that one English dialect is in all ways superior to the others is
drole. In the United States I say zee, and in the UK and its quondam
colonies I say zed.
The educated are presumably familiar with both forms, as educated Brits know
that a lift in an elevator in the United States and educated Americans know
that molasses is treacle in the UK.
The uneducated are hostile to the unfamiliar, and it is usually simpler to
adapt to what they say locally than it is to hold out for one's own foreign
idiom.
One can of course have preferences. I prefer our American fall to the
British autumn, which the Brits once had but have lost. (This is, oddly,
very often the case: The notionally 'unique' American usage often turns out
to be an old, obsolete British one. Brits, for example, often deplore the
American idiom 'I guess' when it doesn't mean 'I conjecture'; but they once
had it too: Chaucer says it repeatedly.
John Gilmore
Ashland, MA 01721
USA
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