Friday, January 26, 2007

Yves Saint-Laurent or a wooden contraption?

The word YSL crossed my mind this morning and got me thinking.

Do we all have to pronounce it as individual letters à la "Why Ess Ell"? Can we start pronouncing it like how it's spelt, ie "Eezel"? And if it's pronounced "eezel", doesn't that sound like another word - "easel"? And if the word "easel" can be spelt with 60% of the letters (meaning 3 letters instead of 5, tsk!) and still be pronounced the same way, why didn't they spell it that way? It'd be easier to engrave (18th century), easier to write (19th century), easier to type (20th century and onwards) and on the whole, much bloody easier to remember during spelling tests...

Maybe someone should petition the Royal Academy of Spelling to change the spelling of "easel" to "ysl". Then maybe someone in Hong Kong can start a clothing brand name called "YSL" and if he gets dragged to court on copyright issues, he can just claim that he wanted to use the word "YSL" in the sense that it is a wooden contraption used to hold canvases for painting.

But why go through all that trouble, actually? There are probably a dozen "YSL"s already in Japan.

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