"easy" abbreviated as EZ.

Post Reply New Topic

British people and Australians get confused by this because they read EZ as "ee zed".

I knew there must be a good reason why I don't like the abbreviation. So the answer is that it's not a very good abbreviation.

[pedantic lecture]Becoming obscure just to save 2 characters smacks of bone idleness. Laziness is good if it gets the job done properly without spending as much time, but if it mucks up the result just to save a tiny amount of time like that, it's bad. Granted, it might work for Americans, but when they know the audience isn't exclusively American, it's elitist and exclusionist. Somebody should give them a Yanks-only section for that kind of behaviour.[/pedantic lecture]

^ Aren't you a temporary Yank right now?

No. We don't.

I didn't know Americans pronounced 'Z' as 'Zee' until about five years ago.

You never watched sesame street then I take it

Your assumption is 100% correct.

I knew it

I have read that some British people are starting to adopt the EZ abbreviation for "easy" despite the fact that they say "z" as "zed" just because they have seen the abbreviation so much.

There is no zed in easy

We're more than capable of having a single letter represent two different sounds in different contexts without getting confused. Much as we do with c and g.

We even manage not to collapse in befuddlement over words like cycle and garage which have the same letter representing two different sounds in the same word.

English is a tricky language nonetheless, is it not? How about the fact that 'bow' and 'bough' can sound the same, and then again you get 'bow' (and arrow...). Why is 'bough' not pronounced to rhyme with 'cough'? Then we have 'rough'....

No, I'm an alien with the indefinite right to remain in the USA as long as I don't leave the country for too long or get caught breaking the criminal law, or try to spread communism of course. I think I have to maintain some kind of social standing in the USA as well. But even if I go for citizenship, they accept that I'm too old to learn very much about the USA, so I'd get a dummied-down version of the test. I very much doubt that the meaning of "EZ" would come up, and I'm almost certain I'd be allowed to dislike the term.

Zee fits the alphabet rhyme (Ay, bee, see, dee, ee, eff, gee, etc).

Zed does not.

You dont say "Ay, Bed, Sed, dead, eff, jed,...." do you?

So WTF is up with "zed"?

Ergo we Americans say it right!

So get with the program already...you Brits (the few of you who never watched Sesame Street).

Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.