Marvin Gaye? I always get those two confused.
I know this because I lived in Canada as a teenager and have travelled to Britain quite a lot. But I can assure you that it NEVER comes up in American pop culture that the letter is pronounced differently in other countries. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if most Americans are unaware of it.
(1) I rarely travel outside of the United States. My passport has not been valid for almost 20 years. This is not to say I don’t travel; the US covers almost 10 million square kilometers.
(2) While I constantly interact with people born outside of the US, English is rarely their first language. The few times I do speak to people born in UK/Australia/New Zealand, we don’t go reciting the alphabet to each other.
(3) I’m hard of hearing.
(4) I read a lot, and I never watch TV. I rarely watch foreign films. I depend on the written word when surfing the internet, not the spoken word. See (3) if you find this dependance on the written word hard to comprehend.
I’m amused that you seem to think knowing all the ways the English language is spoken would be universal.
Sorry, but, yeah, it’s pretty low on the old social radar. Worse, aren’t there other letters of the alphabet that Yanks and Brits name differently?
I learned of it from the tv show “The Prisoner” where he gives his code-designation as “Zed Em 73.”
Not long before his death, a home intruder broke into his home and stabbed him repeatedly, and he really thought he was going to die in that moment.
I’m pretty sure that’s what you were thinking of.
Stargate Atlantis had a Canadian character, Rodney McKay, and a technology called Zero Point Modules, or ZPM.
Rodney invariably pronounced it Zed Pee Em, whereas everybody else (mostly Americans) called it Zee Pee Em. I don’t remember the Irish character ever having to mention it.
Nobody batted an eye, in universe, nor have I ever seen discussion of the show asking why Rodney was saying ‘zed’, instead of ‘zee.’
(It was always slightly jarring, as I don’t remember him using any other Canadianisms, or words we share with the British. I was always waiting for him to address a Lt just to see if they’d get that right.)
Why? I mean, we all know you guys pronounce the letter “Zee”. I really don’t see why you wouldn’t be aware of the reverse, especially if you’re a fan of Doctor Who, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy etc.
And I don’t expect people to know all the ways the English language is pronounced - but when the standard English of the majority of Anglophone nations has a particular pronunciation for something then yeah, I think it’s reasonable for a majority of people in the Anglophone world to be aware of that, even if they don’t use that pronunciation themselves.
“Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.”
Is Pulp Fiction not popular culture now? 
I suppose w is a little different, since we say double-you and I know at least some areas of the US say it dub-ya. Can’t think of any other differences though, and that one’s pretty small.
Don’t forget the character Zed in “Men In Black.”
Chiefly in Texas. Former president George W. Bush has become famously known as “Dubya.”
No, I don’t think so…unless you’re thinking of “r,” whose name of course sounds quite different between rhotic and non-rhotic accents (of which there are several of both in both the US and the British Isles.)
Hey, that argument is pretty much why Guns and Roses broke up. Slash wanted to play metal, Axl wanted to play soft rock with wailing guitars, and everyone else just wanted to play. Also, Axl is kind of an asshole.
Van Halen have featured pretty prominently in the Guitar Hero games. Hot for Teacher was in the hardest set of songs in the first or second game. I’ve heard a lot of musicians say that having their songs featured in Guitar Hero and Rock Band instantly boosted their sales; hell, I bought two Dream Theater albums because Guitar Hero 3 had Pull Me Under in it.
There is a (primarily socioeconomic) divide in England among people who pronounce the letter H as “aitch” (ie., the same way Yanks do) and “haitch”.
In my class the other day I mentioned Buckminster Fuller, and not a single person in the class had ever heard that name before. OK, not really a pop culture name, but still.
I had to look him up. I had a vague idea that he was an American inventor, which I suppose isn’t too far off. His fault for being named for a fictional English town.
As I responded to in the other thread, “Zed” is just a stereotypical “hillbilly” name like Cletus and Zeke. I never thought of it as referring to the letter, but rather a shortening of “Zedekiah.” The portrayal of Zed’s character in the movie makes it pretty clear to me that that’s what the writers were trying to evoke with the name: a redneck, country stereotype. “Zed” as being named after the letter “zee” doesn’t really make much sense to me. Perhaps there’s some sort of secondary meaning with him being the, I dunno, last of something (but I don’t know what he’d be the last of to name him “z”), but that’s not the primary connotations of the name “Zed” in the US.
Sometime back in the days when (videos were rented from buildings and not vending machines) I used to rent old movies. Sometimes, I find that I’ll get references from those rentals that I otherwise wouldn’t. One of those was Deliverance.
Not to long after that, there was a commercial for a SUV that was being used for a camping trip. Familiar banjo music started playing and the manic pace at which the camp was taken down and packed in the car was so funny, I nearly died laughing. I still smile thinking of it today. I’ve seen many other references like since then, so I must assume I just missed them before that.
So the movie is almost as old as I am. That means I must have been missing Deliverance jokes for about 2 or 3 decades! Life seems so much funnier when you get the jokes, I wonder what I’m missing now…
Holy shit! :eek: I just realized something!
All this talk about ‘zee’ and ‘zed’ made me realize that the movie MIB had a big boss named “Zed”. I always thought it was weird since everyone else was just referred to as a letter. Now it makes sense!
Re Buckminster Fuller: to be annoyingly nitpicky, there is a real place in England called Buckminster. It’s a village in the English Midlands, about seven miles south of the town of Grantham (Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace).