quatermain - the onnly problem i can see in your otherwise quite lucid hypothesis, is that surely nought killed would be abbreviated to something like "nookay" (with the flattened - scottish-esque - "oo"). or if it were american, surely it would have been zero killed - "zookay"?!
but you're quite correct about the assimilation of military words into the english language; as a brief example, from the first world war, we gained blimp, antiaircraft gun, tank (don't...), barrage, dud, periscope, machine gun, dugout, slacker, cootie, blackout, blitz and evacuate to name just a few. some of these were new creations, some were old words that had been resurrected with a new meaning.

Thank you all for an informative thread in which I came out the other end wiser about the thing I was confused about and confused about something I thought I was wise to!

Jon,

"0 Killed" sounding "oh-killed". To state the obvious, due to the near-identicality of graphemes 0 and O, we often pronounce the digit 0 "oh". Double-oh seven, Roland TR seven-oh-seven, and so forth.

(Let us make sure that, lest we are accosted by figures of authority and subsequently prosecuted and/or incarcerated, we surrender legal tender in exchange for our dried figs and pickles in Sainsburys.)

Oh, and ps- I was going to say this to you in another email or when you come by tomorrow but I might forget - did you tell the Lido person we sound a bit like Melt Banana? Maybe that was where the "Banana mayhem" thing came from.

Thanks to this thread, I just realized that OK isn't an abbreviaton of okay. If you type "okay" into www.m-w.com, you get back an entry for OK which cites the oll korrect source.

Who knew?

mike; granted, but then i've never seen anyone get confused with 5 and S before, nor 1 and I. but i'll accept your point none-the-less.
i have already emailed you regarding the possiblity of a melt banana / mayhem-inducing banana cock-up. stop fucking pigs and check your emails.

Jon wrote:mike; granted, but then i've never seen anyone get confused with 5 and S before, nor 1 and I. but i'll accept your point none-the-less.

0 has going for it not just that it looks like an 'o' but half of the pronounced word is 'oh' as in zer-Oh...it's aided by verbal laziness since all the other digits (except 7, but that doesn't look or sound like nothing else) are monosyllabic... that's just me making assumptions, but i do find in casual conversation it's spoken as 'oh' more than any other word for it...

russ wrote:Thanks to this thread, I just realized that OK isn't an abbreviaton of okay.

one of my favorite threads here.

i got a short list of some more abbreviations and acronyms that evolved into phonetically spelled words:

government P => jeep
construction battalion => seabee
T shirt => tee shirt
george walker bush => george dubya bush
vice president => veep
high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle => humvee

are there more?

that's the best snooze I've had in ages. thanks guys!

only here wrote:i got a short list of some more abbreviations and acronyms that evolved into phonetically spelled words:

government P => jeep

you seem to have misspelled "general purpose" as "government P"!

the word "jeep" came from a sound, a spoken interpretation of "GP", which stands for "general purpose", which was the use of the vehicle.

Two GI acronyms -

Situation Normal, All Fucked Up

and

Fucked Up, Got Ambushed, Zipped In.

The etymology on OK listed above is silly. YOU GUYS SPEND TOO MUCH TIME BELIEVING THINGS THAT PEOPLE OTHER THAN ME SAY. Here's the scoop:

O.K. is an acronym for Okee-Dokee.

I mean, fucking duh, guys.

= Justin