Something which came up in this threadhere - apparently significant numbers of Americans are unaware the letter “Z” is pronounced “Zed” in the UK (and Australia, and New Zealand).
So: Is this really true? Are significant numbers of Americans really unaware of the Commonwealth pronounciation of the letter Z? And if so, why? I mean, all of us in the Commonwealth know you prounounce the letter “Zee”, so why not the other way around?
I maintain, as I did in the other thread, it’s the sort of thing a reasonably intelligent adult American with an internet connection would surely have encountered at some point (YouTube clip, Dr Who, “Ways those wacky Limeys are different to us” jokes, etc) but apparently not, it seems.
I’d imagine it’s fairly common, when does it ever come up? You get our TV shows and movies and pop culture. You’d be exposed to “zee” on a regular basis. You may be overestimating how much commonwealth popular culture is imported in the US. Very little.
Lots of Americans seem pretty familiar with British comedy series etc. Isn’t BBC America pretty popular over there?
Also as I mentioned in the other thread, what about the quote from Pulp Fiction: “Zed’s dead, baby”? If you don’t know Zed = Z, isn’t that a pretty nonsensical name?
The BBC America is not that popular. And though I’ve watched plenty of BBC programs myself, I can’t think of any that illustrated the fact that Brits say zed.
As for Pulp Fiction, Zed is a character’s name. He is dead. We don’t need to know that Zed means something other than that to make some sense of the statement.
Yeah, BBC America is really a niche thing, with a cult following. I know a few Dr. Who fans, but the vast majority of my IRL circle wouldn’t be able to identify the Tardis.
To be fair, I was pretty advanced in teen years before I clocked that Americans say ‘Zee’. I was too old to be watching Sesame Street and I didn’t even twig when ZZ Top were in the charts – I just assumed they didn’t spell out their full name, you know, Zee Zee Top. If I’d only ever seen it on an album sleeve, I would’ve assumed it was pronounced Zed Zed Top.
Of course, around the same time, everyone I knew pronounced Nike to rhyme with bike.
To be fair, going the other way I never realised that Americans write dates as month/day/year till I was about 26. It just…never came up. I can easily see this slipping under the radar. Clearly, though, enough people did get it in the linked thread to riff on it with you though. “Hey WTF Zed??” didn’t show up until about the 4th response.
The UK is ruled by a Queen, has a lot of old buildings, and people drink tea. Australia has kangaroos & convicts. New Zealand is the part of Australia where Xena lives. That about sums up the average American’s knowledge of the Commonwealth.
Canadians use “zed” too. The only reason I know is because on Stargate Atlantis, Rodney, a Canadian character used to call their power source a “Zed”-P-M while everyone else called it a ZPM.
I once saw a clip of David Letterman doing a local promo for his show on WPTZ (Plattsburgh, NY, I think). Somebody had just asked him to pronounce W-P-T-Zed (because much of the WPTZ audience was in Québec, and it’s pronounced Zed in French too). He had never heard of such a thing.
It’s not that “Americans don’t care” about other cultures – it’s that their exposure to them isurtailed. There is a vast range of cultural content – television, movies, literature, comics, magazines, and so forth – that simply isn’t distributed in the US. It’sd absurd to say that it isn’t distributed because there’s no audience for it, because there’s really no way to know – no opne’s really tried to introduce them and see how it would catch on if they tried. I’m certain part of this is as reluctance of the powerrs-that-be to introduce compertition for home-grown material, but somehow popular interest has enabled a lot of Japasnese pop culture to break into surprisingly broad popularity in the US, even against cultural and language differences. You’d think that European things, say, or NZ/Australian ones would make the transition evenb easier – they’rer in English, or in languages that a lot of Americans know. But the only times I’ve ever seen a lot of their movies and TV shows is when I am abroad. The stuff isn’t even available here on DVD or on odd cable channels.*
The thing about “zed” is that it ought to habve diffused across our border more easily than it has – it’s not just UK/Australian/NZ, it’s Canadian, or at least used to be. I learned about it when I was a kid from our Canadian neibors.
That said, I have to agree that I can’t recall offhand a single case where I heard a character in any UK/Aussie/NZ/Canadian show or movie using “zed” in such a way that it’s obvious that it refers to a letter. Occasuionally it shows up in a name or designation (like Sean Connery’s character in Zardoz), but while that may be an obvious reference to people who use that as a regular name for the last letter of the alphabet, to Americans it’s just an odd-sounding name.
*So why IS this the case? That would be an interesting topic for discussion. As I say, I don’t think it’s just “Americansd aren’t interested”. I don’t want to sound sinister or conspiratorial, but I think the gatekeepers of pop culture are , if not working against making this content available, at least not going very far to make it asccessible. If that weren’t the case, then explain the TV broadcast standard zones to me. I can’t believe that American kids wouldn’t watch the recent Asterix films, both live action and especially the animated Asterix and the Norsemen, as readily as they have watched other overseas animated fare.
CalMeacham, you’ll be happy to know that right here in Kansas, two-year-olds are passionate aboot Canadian television shows. This is mainly due to chance – one of the two basic cable networks directed at them (Sprout) happens to have aboot half of its content from Canada – surely this is just due to how the network happened to be founded or something.
So, my two-year-old son calls baseball bats “hockey sticks,” and any animal with horns is a “moose.” I kid you not!
Good to know, but that’s only because a very few Canadian shows show up on US cable. In an ideal world, your kids would also have the option of watching Doctor Who-esque Time Travel shows from New Zealand.
Actually, I don’t believe they do pronounce it “zed”; they’re just pulling our legs. Because if they really did pronounce it that way, that would be silly.
“Zee” seems to fit better with the rest of the alphabet, following the pattern of almost all the other consonants (besides H, Q, and W), whose names are the sounds they make preceded or followed by a vowel sound.
There’s a Staff Report on Why do the British pronounced the letter Z “zed”? which I find unsatisfying (even aside from the fact that it has some extraneous paragraph breaks). “‘Zed’ comes from the original Greek zeta,” it explains; yet we don’t pronounce the letter B analogously as “bed.” Still, it’s given me the idea to start pronouncing the letter Z as “uzzard” and see if that catches on.
Agreed, but this is getting rather moot…whenever my two-year-old get his hands on my Iphone, he scrolls through Ukrainian train videos, Thai cartoons, and Bolivian children’s songs in minutes.
I looked in a large video rental shop in California for European films, e.g. one of the Federico Fellini greats – I found a single shelf. Even if you think European films are no better than American films, they have very different style, so should have a market if only for the variety – yet are almost unknown in the U.S.A.
One of the more reprehensible actions taken by U.S. during WTO negotiations was (on behalf of Disney etc.) to forbid governments (like Poland’s) from subsidizing their film industries. The rationale was so hypocritical as to nauseate – the prohibition on national film subsidies was to promote diversity. :dubious: :smack:
Yes, Americans are culturally isolated. I ask those who deny this to tell us if they even have a passport.
