Life is characterised by endless discoveries of unimportant outrages that have, unnoticed until they smacked you in the face, been making the world a tiny bit worse. Jerks watching video on public transport without wearing headphones. Other jerks using the phrase “reach out to” when they could say “talk to”. You know the stuff.
A few weeks ago I resisted the urge to growl when an Irish character in a new Irish play spoke the phrase “A to zee”. It could just be an aberration. Then she did it again. Obviously, as I am not a complete maniac, I did not mention this in my review, but subsequent researches have made it imperative I now yell at you.
Climbing on my highest horse, I wondered, the day after the play, if there was a whole generation of people now speaking the American “zee” when they should be using the Hiberno-Irish “zed”. Who doesn’t savour another opportunity to unfairly demonise Generation Zed? (No, I don’t normally write it like that, but allow some leeway.)
Well, yes. There was such a move. But what surprised was the information that this had been going on for decades. I talked to a friend born in the 1970s and asked if his children, all Gen Z, had fallen into this unlovely habit. There was a pause. They certainly had. So, apparently, had my friend. Many years earlier.
Further research confirmed that, as well as rhyming “Z” with “flea” since Jack Lynch was taoiseach, Irish people now don’t even recognise it as being an Americanism. “I’m in my 50s, and it’s always been zee,” someone responded online. “I’m of the same vintage as you and a Limerick native, and it was always zee in our house,” someone else noted. “Think you’re just assuming your way is the normal way and the other is foreign? Always was zee in my house too,” another commentator ventured.
Let us be clear. You may or may not care whether US usage enters Hiberno-English. You may be part of that band who, in such conversations, point out that “language evolves, you know”. But what is not in doubt is that “zee” is (or was) an Americanism. Using it is (or was) akin to saying “tom-ay-to,” “math” or “aluminum”. The United States is just about the only country in the English-speaking world that does favour the “zee”.
Proofed.com notes, “Zed is technically the correct version in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, India, Australia and New Zealand, and zee is technically correct in the United States.” The usage is (or was) almost as eccentric as the American mm/dd/yyyy date notation. Give it a year or two and we’ll be remembering this Christmas as falling on 12/25/2024.
Our preferred pronunciation came down from the Greek “zeta” via the French “zede”. Older readers may remember a once-common “eh-zed” version in Ireland that carried on to words beginning with that letter. One might, therefore, if in the vicinity of Phoenix Park, take a visit to the “eh-zoo”. There was a related “izard” for the same letter in Middle English, and, I learn, a variation on that survives in Hong Kong English.
The American version first emerged in the early 19th century and was then promoted by the lexicographer Noah Webster. The creator of the eponymous dictionary enjoyed formalising spellings and usages that helped establish a separate American identity. It was also felt that the “zee” made a tad more phonetic sense. Fair enough. The characteristic can-do attitude that led to the elimination of “u” from “colour” and “favour” is hard to argue with in practical terms.
Let us not pretend, however, that, following the rise of US popular culture from the 1950s, the increased adoption of Americanisms was to do with a preference for linguistic logic. It was about aping Elvis, Jim Morrison, Chuck D, Taylor Swift and those yet to come in the endless American future.
The story of Z is a little different, and the true culprit is hard to hate. The bringer of “zee” was, arguably, a greater exemplar of postwar US benevolence than even the Marshall Plan (because there was no anti-communist subtext). In conversations on this unimportant topic, I was again and again reminded that without “zee” The ABC Song doesn’t rhyme.
That helpful ditty, sung to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, was copyrighted in Boston nearly 200 years ago but did not gain ubiquity here, possibly because of the Z issue, until the peerless Sesame Street arrived in Britain and Ireland during the early 1970s. Those who became literate before then have no truck with “zee”. Those who did not live, at best, with both pronunciations in their heads. None of which makes Cookie Monster any less of a cultural giant.
