Rabbits Against Magic by Jonathan Lemon for August 16, 2009

I find it, oh so true.

Sometimes though, acceptance hurts.

You know, putting a crossbar through your 7s doesn’t make you better’n me.

Sorry Jo Jo but it does (must do ‘cause I do it)

@Jonathan Tragically, I do. Sorry. Those European scars never heal… I guess that makes me doubly odd. But then, we knew that, didn’t we?

So we have at least established that even if crossing your sevens (I know I do) doesn’t make you better than Jo Jo (although we only have Jo Jo’s own statement to that effect), it certainly makes you part of a group that outnumbers Jo Jo by at least three to one ;-)

Sometimes i cross my sevens, sometimes i don’t.

Ditto zeds.

I cross my sevens. I’ve been in Europe, and while there I was explicitly told to cross them lest local readers misunderstand me. Now, I just like it.

Who’s making 7’s and Z’s angry in Europe? I tend to be neutral toward my numbers and letters, but I confess I had a bit of a bite from a B once that had me cross for a while…

I see nothing wrong with crossing sevens at all. a lot of people in my family do that.

I don’t see where that started. Anyway, as a programmer, I learned to put dashes across both my sevens and my zees, so that the keypunch operator could be certain they weren’t i’s and twos. I also put a slash across zeros. This really doesn’t make them cross at all. Nor does it make me any better or worse than anyone else.

Fairportfan - I still remember the first time I became aware that there’s a different way to say the twentysixth letter of the alphabet - someone in Canada was spelling a name for me, and one letter was zed, so I thought they were doing phonetic spelling (alpha, bravo, etc.) - much hilarity ensued.

“Zed” for the Scots apparently was yclept “ezed” which gave rise to the regional variant “izzard.” The Pert’s mum taught her this word game when she was little: “B- u- izzard- izzard,- a- r- d spells buzzard” which no doubt marked her for life with a love for odd words and rhythm. Guess that’s one way to start a poet.

Jonathan - depends on how you dress them…

I cross my Z’s in math class…