But still!) I have two zee-related suspicions: (1) Some BrE speakers prefer zee ![]() Not happy about it! Ross, Londonįair enough, but why has zed come to us from zeta, but beta hasn't turned up in English as bed? (Because it's come from French and they did it that way. I hear more and more people pronouncing the letter Z as " zee". Here's their Number 46, followed by my reply:Ĥ6. The last time I talked about these was in my grumpy (but reasonably well-informed) reply to BBC News Magazine's (merrily uninformed) grumpfest "Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples". So: BrE zed versus AmE zee, for the last letter of the English alphabet. Since I feel like it should have had its own post, I shall give it one. Since it's nearly midnight as I start this, I consider myself very lucky to have blindly picked one that I've mostly done before. Toward(s) this end, I've stuck my cursor into the e-mailbox that holds the 'potential bloggables'. Researching and writing a historical novelNow that the Term from Hell has finished, I'd like to get back to blogging on an at-least-weekly basis. Are you happy with gradual change, bur have a fear of rapid change?Ĭlick here to buy a copy of Ben’s Challenge from Amazon. We are all seeing change in the culture of our various countries. All I want to do is to show how a culture can gradually change through such simple things as words and their pronunciation. However, I am not dealing with that violent aspect here. This is especially true when the race, religion and culture of the asylum seekers are very different to those of their hosts. When high numbers of people are forced to flee to other countries in fear of their lives, the receiving countries can become fearful that their own culture will be undermined. But that works best when it is slow and steady, as it had been until relatively recently, and when countries already share many aspects of culture and they are given time to adapt. Cultural exchange can be a very positive force for renewal and the creation a vital nation. Telephone providers have had to adapt their systems to allow for a 911 call to go to our own emergency lines.Īll this shows how one culture can affect another so much in a relatively subtle way. Many TV watchers dial the American 911, believing it to be our emergency number too. And when you ask the youngsters there for a ‘biscuit’, they say, “We don’t have biscuits, I’m afraid only cookies.”Įven our emergency call number 000 is under threat. Along with other words, ‘lift’ is becoming ‘elevator’ ‘footpath’ is becoming ‘sidewalk’ ‘bonnet’ and ‘boot’ (of a car) are becoming ‘hood’ and ‘trunk’.ĭon’t ask for ‘chips’ in MacDonald’s, they only have ‘fries’. ![]() However, all that is too late to halt the insidious incursion of the American idiom into our everyday speech. So are our actors, our inventors and our pop stars. Indeed, our scientists and medical researchers are world class and often in demand. Thankfully, we now realise that we have a lot to offer the world. Australians were ashamed of their culture, thinking it could never measure up to the British or the American. One of the reasons it was so successful in Australia up until about the 1990s is what we called the “Cultural Cringe”. Television and movies have done a great deal for the infiltration of American ideas, words, and ways of doing things. I got one! My sister received a cowgirl set – she wasn’t a tomboy like me. Not a girl’s set, but a boy’s boys had more fun then. I wanted a cowboy set for Christmas one year.
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