ANZAC or Anzac?

[Tony Wheeler]

I've certainly learned a lot myself as a result of this thread Lynn. To be honest I wasn't even aware of this issue until Mike raised it here. By pure coincidence I'd just been helping my sister draft a letter about Anzac Day and I noticed she spelt it ANZAC Day, but I didn't give it a second thought until I saw Mike's post next day. I thought she might find it interesting so I copied it to her by email, and judging by her reply she'd never given it any thought either: "Now THERE is a can of worms for me, having been an editor, working at the AWM, etc. - let's put on agenda for when we get together!" Maybe she picked up the habit at AWM.

Personally I'm always suspicious of attempts to control language, and the more I looked into this one the more it looked like political correctness to me, at the expense of history. It's well intentioned but as we all know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The surprising thing for me is that the RSL are so insistent on the use of ANZAC, even for biscuits. They've completely eradicated the word Anzac from their website.

There's an interesting parallel going on in Israel where they object to the trivialization of the word Nazi: "Israel is on the brink of banning the N-word. N as in Nazi, that is. Parliament gave preliminary approval on Wednesday to a bill that would make it a crime to call someone a Nazi..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/wo...ions.html?_r=0