Many of the shortcut methods are simple aliases, ie. click(), blur() and others. ready() however behaves in a very different manner than bind('ready', fn) does. bind('ready') will not automatically run any bound events if $.isReady. Which makes sense to some extent. However, since no difference in the behaviour is documented its easy to assume that ready() is a simple alias like the others. My suggestion would be to make a note how the two methods differ and that they are no directly analogous as far as binding of events is concerned.