Same; I made a ~/bin/telnet that does:

    #!/bin/sh
    nc -v "$1" "${2:-23}"

Obviously it doesn't do the telnet protocol when run on port 23 (note the real telnet client disables the telnet handshake when port != 23, which is why it's useful as a generic TCP client anyway), but this basically keeps my muscle memory happy and it's clear from the output what's happening.