@ediosyncratic - your investigation prompted me to do a bit of digging myself and I ended up reading [RFC6557](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6557) which pointed me to an [IANA time-zone page](ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/tz-link.htm).

Still trying to figure out if the tz database actually uses, or recommends, these abbreviations in practice... even if they don't, do you think the _possiblity_ is compelling enough to make this substitution?