Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 28, 1993                   TAG: 9304280376
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IN THE MILITARY, `DAY-DAY' CAN BE FIGHTING WORDS

A: The Pentagon confirms our worst fear: "D" stands for Day.

That's right, it means Day-day, essentially. But of course no self-respecting soldier would ever use a term like Day-day, because it JOEL ACHENBACH sounds like baby talk. You can just imagine the generals in the command bunker saying, "Boys, there's going to be a lot of bang-bang on Day-day, and so how will we get the troops their din-din?"

Our first thought was that D-day is a ridiculous term, but we've warmed to it. "D-day" is a way of referring to a date, known or unknown, when a military operation begins. It is not event-specific. But the beauty of the term is that it allows you to refer to the next day as "D-plus-1," and the day after that as "D-plus-2." The day before D-day is D-minus-1. Such terminology is economical, precise, quick. So, too, is the hour after H-hour known as H-plus-1.

Think of the alternative. What would you call the day of an upcoming invasion? "The Day We Invade"? "Our Big Moment"? "Harvey"?

You certainly wouldn't want to refer to the day by the date. Imagine if the Allies, while plotting the Normandy Invasion in 1944, used a term like, "Operation: June 6." That would have been bad! We'd probably have bungled the invasion, lost the war, and today the most powerful country in Europe would be Germany. (Hmmmmmm . . . )

The fact is, the military uses the letter-hyphen-day construction for many purposes. M-day, for example, is the day mobilization for war begins. There can be a K-Day, a Z-day, whatever. But the letters D, H and J are generally off limits, used only to designate the commencement of a combat operation. Why the J? Because the J is used by the French.

Their term for D-Day is, would you believe, Jour-J. Yes! Day-Day again!

And you thought the French were so sophisticated.

Q: Why do you have to put the city and state on a letter even though that information is redundant if you have a ZIP code?

A: Let's note right off the bat that New York, N.Y. is way too redundant. There's a saying that New York is a city so great you have to say the name twice. But if you throw in the ZIP code you have an extra redundancy; a letter sent there says, essentially, "New York, New York, New York." All this for a city that is, let's be honest, kind of passe. Kind of '80s.

The fact is, if you want to be obstreperous and cause trouble you can omit either the ZIP code or the city and state. If your address has no ZIP code, the Postal Service has to spend extra time figuring out where, precisely, a street address is in a given city (the ZIP code routes the letter to a specific post office).

If you do include a ZIP code, but no city and state, the letter will go to the right post office, but it may take a while, because the post office has designed everything to handle fully addressed letters. High-speed sorting machines are designed to check the ZIP code against the city and state, and if they match, the letter wings its way with a stamped bar code. Look at any letter with a typed or computer printed address and you'll probably see a bar code; most handwritten letters still are sorted by hand.

And yes, there is a machines-vs.-people issue at work here. The Postal Service is already using automation to sort 40 percent of the nation's mail, and wants to increase that figure. There's fear among postal workers that they will be considered redundant.

The Mailbag:

Melanie H. of Concord, Calif., asks, "What does one call a religion where the participants don't know what to believe? They don't know if they should believe anything?"

Dear Melanie: Agnosticism isn't quite the right word, since that means the absence of religion, and you are thinking of a religion that simply has no principles. How about "the legal profession"?

Washington Post Writers Group

Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.\ \ Richard Thompson, a regular contributor to the Washington Post, has illustrated "Why Things Are" since 1990.