Jay Zee or Jay Zed? I can tell your age by your answer
Z has always been trouble. The letter began as an axe some 3000 years ago. Picture an upper-case I, with serifs at either end, a symbolic hatchet the Phoenicians called zayin. Centuries later, the Greeks tilted its central shaft and tweaked the strokes. They called it zeta, a clone of our Z on paper.
Julius Caesar and co, however, turned up their aquiline noses. Who needed Z if S could serve? Begrudgingly, the zigzag heirloom lingered in Greek loanwords – like zona or zoologica. A cameo compared to the subsequent Gaul rendezvous. Soon zeta was reborn as zède, the French seed of the English zed.
Come the early 1400s, a Middle English document placed zed above the alternatives of izzard, zad, shard, ezod and zee. Despite that, Z remained a phonic puzzle. Proof arrived two centuries on, a Somerset priest named Thomas Lye (also known as Leigh or Lee) crowning zee as czar in his New Spelling Book, the label an offshoot of the bee-cee-dee pattern.
By then, America was finding its colonial feet. New England wasn't England after all. Breakaway pilgrims delighted in maverick ways of speaking and spelling. Noah Webster led the way, the Connecticut lexicographer usurping -ISE with -IZE in multiple forms, as well as declaring zee the logical pronunciation, as if to ostracize (sic) the motherland. Add The ABC Song, haunting Boston in the early 1800s, and the Yankee zee was enshrined.
Zed meanwhile sizzled in Britain, and her obedient outposts. That's despite Shakespeare's burn in King Lear, where the Earl of Kent reminds Oswald, his uppity servant, how he's nothing short of 'thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!' Officially, the Oxford Dictionary concedes both pronunciations, with Canada, Australia and NZ ('En-Zed') leaning towards the Anglophilic. Until now, it seems.
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There's been a shift. Have you noticed? Maybe Sesame Street moved the needle, or ZZ Top. Perhaps Dragonball-Z or Video-Ezy played a role. Or Jay-Z and Z-Boy skaters of Santa Monica. Was it World War Z: Brad Pitt versus the zombies? Whichever the culprit, the zee-drift is accelerating in Australia, just as Gen-Z is seizing society's joystick.
Ideal really, since Gen-Z is its own shibboleth, a language test to betray your true colours, if not your age. Since those in the club, be they Gen-Z members or timeline neighbours, will opt for 'Gen-Zee' in pronunciation, as if daring you to correct them.
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