Amy Glover reports for HuffPost on a phenomenon that seems to distress many:
You might already know that how long you can stand on one leg has been linked to your brain age ― the position involves coordinating different parts of your body and mind, making it uniquely useful as a marker of ageing. But not all the signs are medical, as anyone who’s ever looked at a festival lineup and thought “I don’t recognise a single name here” knows.
And recently, members of r/AskUK wondered whether or not the pronunciation of the letter “z” counts as one such marker. “I was horrified to learn that a fully British colleague of mine says ‘zee’ for the letter zed and he says he always has. Is this now common and I have just lost touch?”, a now-deleted poster asked. So, we spoke to clinical linguist and CEO of Dysolve, Dr Coral Hoh, about what was really going on.
“Yes, it’s generational but not confined to the UK alone,” the linguist said of the Americanised pronunciation. “It is also the case in other English-speaking regions,” she told HuffPost UK. “For example, in Southeast Asia, in countries like Singapore and Malaysia, speakers in their 30s-40s may use ‘zee’ and ‘zed’ interchangeably.” Meanwhile, she says, “their younger counterparts prefer the former, thanks to American influence.”
Indeed New Zealand magazine North And South have written about increased Americanisms among their younger people. […] “Americanisms are becoming more and more common, I blame YouTube,” Redditor u/Frst-Lengthiness-16 opined. “My kids refuse to call biscuits by the correct name, calling them fucking ‘cookies.’”
Jane Setter, a professor of phonetics at the University of Reading, agrees, telling The Guardian: “For children, it could simply be because everyone is watching a particular trending YouTube influencer or group of influencers, or playing particular online interactive games, through word of mouth and a desire to fit in with their friends, that these people speak in a particular way, and the kids are using the features of those speakers with other kids to show they “belong” to that group.”
This may be part of the reason why Americanisms are so common among Gen Z (never said “Gen Zed,” I note) and younger…
As an American, I apologize on behalf of my cohort for foisting our degenerate pronunciations on the rest of the world. (Thanks, Bonnie!)
I always sang zee at the end of the Alphabet Song. (Poetic licence? Poetic coercion.) My parents did not object, but encouraged a segue into “X Y Zed / Sugar on your bread / Porridge in the morning / Cocoa going to bed”.
I would say Gen Zed if I had any reason to, because it had never occurred to me not to. (The OED gives both pronunciations for the UK.) But I’m not sure what the youngsters in my office would say.
Smallcousin says zed at school, I think.
Kiwi fans of old-timey boogie rock should be stoked* to know that this coming May that little ol’ band from Texas Zed Zed Top (one original member lost to death but the other two still going with a stand-in) will be playing three shows in Aotearoa: one night each in Christchurch, Wellington, and Auckland. (Accompanied by, as opening act, my Northern Delaware homeboy George Thorogood, whose backing band apparently still has some of the same other guys it did back in the Seventies when I was in junior high school.)
The important thing is to get everyone in the crowd to refer to them as Zed Zed Top.
*I did some searching to see what NZ** slang we Americans could potentially adopt to keep the books balanced, and one list offered “stoked” which is of course California slang for my generational cohort of Americans. Not saying it was culturally misappropriated by the Kiwis, but it’s not something we could adopt as a Kiwiism.
**Do older people down there say these initials aloud as en-zed rather than en-zee? That possibility just struck me for perhaps the first time in my life.
Does anyone say “izzard” anymore?
Wiktionary sez “Scotland, Hong Kong, and archaically in England and Ireland.”
There is a furniture store near me in Cork named “EZ Living”. I assume EZ is a rebus for “easy” and pronounce it accordingly. But if I saw a (vintage) car reg “EZ 123” I would say Zed.
In 2005 I strolled to a cinema and decided to watch “Dogtown and Z-Boys”, mentally pronounceing it “Zed-Boys” until the Californians on screen said the name, triggering an internal “d’oh, of course”.
@mollymooly: perhaps that plate could be on a half-century old Datsun 260Zed, which will apparently now run you upwards of 30,000 Euros in Ireland for a specimen in good condition. (Looks like Europe mostly didn’t get the 280Zee, with a slightly larger engine, which was targeted at the North American market.)
@J. W. Brewer: **Do older people down there say these initials aloud as en-zed rather than en-zee? That possibility just struck me for perhaps the first time in my life.
I’m sure it first occurred to me when I read Friday, by Robert Heinlein. A significant part of the story takes place in N. Z., and the narrator calls it “Ennzedd” several times. I think that took me a while to figure out.
Of course the second d keeps the reader from pronouncing it to rhyme with, uh, “lensed”, but I don’t know the reason for the second n. Symmetry.
(I like Friday, but no one should take that as a recommendation.)
Was Shel Silverstein’s Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book popular in the zedophone countries?
My grandma would say `from A to Izzard’.
Many mathematicians say zee for $z$ and Zed for $\mathbb Z$ when speaking from the blackboard.
@Jerry F.: Thanks, interesting. I will confess that I’ve read most of Heinlein’s works, but never quite got to _Friday_. I’m more of a _Podkayne of Mars_ man. Although before double-checking I typed out Podkayne of Venus, because that’s where the more memorable part of the plot takes place. Ennzeddwise, Heinlein places a “New Auckland” on Venus but I think that may have been in another book?
JWB — Z-Cars were Fords
Over more than four decades of watching British television shows, I have seen increasing Americanization of the language.* Perhaps this was most pronounced, among shows that I liked, in New Tricks,** although that show had ended its run a decade ago now. And New Tricks seemed to use “zee” and “zed” indiscriminately for the last letter of the alphabet.
* On the other hand, there are still problems with putting Brittishisms into the mouths of supposedly American characters. This is less and less understandable over time, although the most unforgivable case remains Fawlty Towers, since it was co-written by an American. (Cleese’s ignorance of American speech and culture was worse in A Fish Called Wanda, but that wasn’t co-scripted by any of his Anerican wives or ex-wives.) Bruce Boa’s character in the very first episode is a disaster (although his absurd attempt at an American accent was apparently interesting enough that Kubrick cast him as the general in Full Metal Jacket); Boa would have been more convincing as an American if he had used his relatively neutral natural accent, as in The Empire Strikes Back.
** I don’t know to what extent this is really relevant, but I did associate the Americanized esthetic of New Tricks with its extensive but not emphasized use of pop cultural references. For example, in an episode in which someone was killed by a blank fired from a gun with something lodged in the barrel, the solution turned on a reference to Bruce Lee; however, it was never explicitly pointed out that that was exactly how Bruce’s son, Brandon Lee, had died. The show also showed a lot of victims with severe burn scars, but never commented on Amanda Redman’s own scars. By the episode in which Denis Lawson joined the cast, I knew from the outset that there would be a mention of Star Wars slipped into that episode’s dialogue, referencing Lawson’s best known role as Wedge.
The local Ghanaian English name for the northern staple food, millet porridge (Kusaal sa’ab) is “TZ”, an abbreviation of the Hausa tuwon zafi “hot tuwo, hot porridge”, though the name is also used for the cold stuff (don’t ask.) It’s called tô in French, presumably from Manding (cf Dyula tò) rather than Hausa.
It recently occurred to me that for the benefit of benighted foreigners* I should add a note in my Kusaal grammar explaining that “TZ” is in fact pronounced “tee zed.”
* Americans.
Does zed not survive in Canadian English? I remember hearing that pronunciation in Montreal, London, and/or Toronto in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Non-geographic variation in Austria for J /jeː/ ~ /jɔtː/ and Q /kʋeː/ ~ /kuː/. I’m used to using the first of each pair; only the second of each pair seems to be known in Germany; here in Berlin I’ve had to take up the habit of saying how my name is spelled with /jɔtː/, because when I say /jeː/ they write a G every time.
No variation in German for Z /tsɛtː/, because /tseː/ is C.
Going in a single syllable! I find that wonderful.
*splutter*
…I had no idea.
Offset by local innovations, e.g. the stunningly fast and apparently complete replacement of while by whilst.
I’m not a fluent LaTeX reader. Do you just mean lowercase & uppercase?
The latter is ℤ (as in the set of integers). The former is script 𝓏, as used e.g. for a variable name.
Unicode also has some two dozen more, under “miscellaneous mathematical symbols”.
…I bet that “ο” is a glitch for ω.
I rather think that alleged NZ ‘informant’ is talking uninformed bollix (to borrow a word from a Pub name in Auckland — Irish influence).
“My kids refuse to call biscuits by the correct name, calling them fucking ‘cookies.’”
They’ve always been called ‘cookies’ in my 30 years in NZ. FFS there’s a well-known company called ‘Cookie Time’. “manufacturing snack foods since 1983. …It is fronted by a mascot known as the Cookie Muncher.” And what’s called ‘cookies’ are qualitatively different (better than!) those pathetic pads of blotting paper the Brits call ‘biscuits’.
North & South [BTW that link seems to be broken] used to be a quality magazine, but increasingly is full of clickbait of the “Why do we all …?” kind of hook. (Typically I don’t.)
Thanks @JWB, I’ve always called that band ‘Zee Zee Top’ — though I’ve no idea what I would have heard from them, must have been in the ’70’s in Blighty. (No I won’t be going to their concert.) I’ve always said ‘Liza with a Zee’ (Minnelli).
I’ve always said ‘Zed’ for the letter. That doesn’t seem to cause conniptions amongst the yoof here.
don’t know the reason for the second n. Symmetry.
Yes, ‘EnnZedd’ should be pronounced as two, full, equally-balanced syllables — it’s an initialism, not a word. OTOH ‘WINZ’ [Work & Income New Zealand, a government agency] is pronounced single syllable, somewhere between ‘wins’ and ‘winz’.
If like me you were confused by the δασια in David M’s papyrus transliteration of the Alphabet Song, it (Spoiler Alert!) turns out to apparently be one of the Greek names for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_breathing mark. I don’t think I was actually ever taught a name for it other than “rough breathing mark-thingie,” but if perchance I was I had forgotten.
In Canada a couple of generations ago I would say zee to annoy my elders. Now I say zed to annoy my Americanized European colleagues.
@JWB:
As in “dasypod.”
(This should really mean “hobbit”, but it’s good that the word exists at all.)
@mollymolly There is a furniture store near me in Cork named “EZ Living”.
ezyliving NZ, which seems to combine garden furniture with gym fitness equipment. (I think there used to be a chain of gyms (‘ezy fitness’?) that have now closed down.) That they bother to include a ‘y’, suggests the rebus doesn’t work reliably in NZ.
Northandsouth.co.nz is DOWN
It is not just you. The server is not responding…
Was the American band ZedZed Top popular in Britain?
@Y: Unless your LaTeX style file calls for a weird custom math font, $z$ is not a script character. See, for example, this Stack Exchange answer.
@AntC: That Cookie Muncher is pretty obviously a ripoff of Sesame Street‘s Cookie Monster. What relevance that has to the naming of the company’s baked confections, I don’t know.
And “Zed Zed Top” was a joke.
Whoops. I’d missed JWB’s previous reference and was making the stale joke myself.
Brett, I’ll take your word for it, but I still can’t visualize a modern math book set in sans serif type or one with even-width stems and using a plain italic z for the variable. But then, I can’t visualize any math book set in sans serif. Even back when they set them with a Selectric, where the body text was in regular typewriter type, variable letters would have extra curves, as in ‘script’.
Mathematicians are verrrry particular about their symbols, that much I know. That’s why Unicode has ℤ𝕫𝐙𝐳𝑍𝑧𝒁𝒛𝒵𝓏𝓩𝔃𝖅𝔷𝖟𝖹𝗓𝗭𝘇𝘡𝘻𝙕𝙯𝚉𝚣, inter alia.
AntC: “I rather think that alleged NZ ‘informant’ is talking uninformed bollix … They’ve always been called ‘cookies’ in my 30 years in NZ”
There is no alleged NZ informant — you may have been misled by Languagehat’s ellipsis, which runs together sentences that appear in different paragraphs in the original. Actually, now that I look at it, the original displays *every* sentence as a separate paragraph — it’s not just my browser, they have <p> </p> tags around them. Yuck.
I’m guessing Languagehat must have combined the first nine sentences into three sensible paragraphs when he copied them, but then he over-combined the next few sentences, which aren’t exactly structured: they bounce from New Zealand, to “Growing up in Ireland”, back to the r/AskUK thread from the top of the article. The quote “My kids refuse to call biscuits by the correct name” is from that thread, and u/First-Lengthiness-16 is in the UK.
Two more letters whose names English speakers disagree on are those in HR, which can be “haitch or” in Ireland.
@Ryan: ZZ Top’s super-smash-hit Eighties albums (from ’83 forward), with their new synthesizer-forward sound and MTV-friendly videos, did very well in the UK charts, about as well as they did in the US. In the Seventies it had not been like that and they had very modest UK sales even when they were already big stars in the US. You can never trust the completeness of internet data, but one source suggests they didn’t first play live in the UK until 1980, which seems plausible. Some sufficiently cool Brits knew about them though. Motorhead recorded a cover version of “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” during the sessions for their own debut album in ’77, although it languished as an unreleased outtake until 1980 when that band had been doing so well in the UK (but not yet in the US) that releasing previously-unreleased outtakes seemed like a good moneymaking idea to someone. Germany has probably been their biggest European market, but they didn’t take off there until ’80 or ’81.
They experienced chart success in Australia as early as ’73 even though they didn’t first get down there to play until maybe ’87. Less clear if they had a Seventies audience in New Zealand although again I don’t fully trust the completeness of the sources I’ve consulted.
@Y: The standard LaTeX math font does have serifs, and use of that font is common even when the running text is set sans serif. But script letters in mathematical expressions are quite uncommon; in my experience, they are even less common than alternative sans serif math fonts.
Two more letters whose names English speakers disagree on are those in HR, which can be “haitch or” in Ireland.
occasionally also A and Q
The existence of zee~zed variation is useful to me when justifying haitch abroad to those who insist it is Just Plain Wrong. Sometimes they will then insist zee or zed is also Just Plain Wrong but it’s no longer “Irish people are silly”, it’s “foreigners are silly”, which is a kind of victory.
Non-geographic variation in Austria for J /jeː/ ~ /jɔtː/ and Q /kʋeː/ ~ /kuː/. I’m used to using the first of each pair; only the second of each pair seems to be known in Germany
Yes; your post is the first time that I hear about the existence of the variants in /e:/ for those two letters.
In the 1997 hit “Never Ever” by the British girl group All Saints, “A to Z” is said as zee the first time and as zed the second:
The members of All Saints are from England except the two Appleton sisters Natalie and Nicole who are originally from Canada.
A year earlier in 1996, “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls (who all hail from England) had zee in “So here’s the story from A to Z”.
I get the impression that in the UK ‘either/neither’ has been almost completely replaced by ‘eether/neether’ just in the last 20 years or so.
If anyone here in the UK home counties is saying “Gen Zee” I’ve never noticed. My GenX~Boomer colleagues, my Millennial friends and my GenZ students all seem to say “zed”.
I see other people report hearing “zee” in the UK, so perhaps it’s not reached university-age folks yet, or perhaps there’s a regional dimension. (Oxford is not precisely at the vanguard of change.)
I suspect that the cool quotient of “zed” in Canada may be getting a big boost right now.
There definitely are cookies in the UK – biggish thickish lumpy biscuits with probably visible lumps of something in them (chocolate, smarties, raisins) – but I’d still be surprised to hear someone call a digestive or a custard cream a cookie.
ETA:
Wikipedia appears to think that brownies are counted as cookies in the US – is this true? They’re definitely a kind of cake for me. (They go hard as they get older, isn’t that the definition?)
Wikipedia appears to think that brownies are counted as cookies in the US – is this true?
Wikipedia is wrong, according to the AE speaker (me) and the BE speaker (wife from the East Midlands) in this household. The latter is a cake connoisseur. Her nickname, according to her best friend in Nottingham, is “Cake”.
ETA (They go hard as they get older, isn’t that the definition?)
If they are any good, they cannot get older.
I would say that brownies are “functionally” cookies in the American context, i.e. they are interchangeable with cookies because often/typically served/consumed in contexts where the obvious alternative given local culinary customs would be core/prototype cookies but not slices of core/prototype cake. I’m not sure that means that most AmEng speakers think of them as “ontologically” being a subgenre of cookies. Fieldwork may be needed; get going on your grant proposals.
ETA: One relevant functional factor is that you use a knife and fork to eat prototypical cake (unless you are a naughty and messy child who disregards what your parents have told you time and again) whereas brownies are a finger food.
I’d expect to find a brownie recipe in a cookbook with cookie recipes and be a little surprised to see it in a cookbook with cake recipes.
With that said, brownies and blondies are neither cake nor cookies, they are a thing all their own.
I’ve never heard anyone (US midwest) refer to brownies as cookies.
*culture shock*
There was a famous misunderstanding of REOs as oreos in the US Senate a few years ago, not involving any connections to Ireland that I know of.
I’m guessing Languagehat must have combined the first nine sentences into three sensible paragraphs when he copied them, but then he over-combined the next few sentences, which aren’t exactly structured: they bounce from New Zealand, to “Growing up in Ireland”, back to the r/AskUK thread from the top of the article.
Well, “over-combined” is in the eye of the beholder. I have no compunction about combining the ridiculously short “paragraphs” newspapers love to use, which just waste space and annoy me, and as for the ellipses, I use them to foreground the bits I want to share — I assume anyone who wants to experience all the connecting tissue and figure out exactly what’s going on will click through.
Oh, and we covered haitch in 2013.
@C Baker: With that said, brownies and blondies are neither cake nor cookies, they are a thing all their own.
Squares or bars, along with lemon squares and seven-layer bars and other things.
I should add that those are somewhat technical terms. You might find a chapter titled “Squares and Bars” in a cookbook, but nobody (in the approximate sense) says “I love squares” or “While you’re at the bakery, get some bars.” The family of a friend of mine in high school threw a cookie party every year shortly before Christmas, and I can imagine a cake party, but I can’t imagine a square party or a bar party. (I’m sure my friend’s party was the former and pretty sure it was not the latter.)
If a brownie is a type of cookie then why invent the brookie?
Isn’t the obvious answer to mollymooly’s question of “why invent the brookie?” that recipe websites desirous of maximizing clicks and thereby maximizing revenue need a constant stream of novelties or alleged novelties or slight cosmetic tweaks on established recipes, whether or not the nation’s eaters actually will benefit from the actual use of any of the thus-generated novelty-recipes in lieu of established recipes.
@JWB: I love the soothing, lawyerly glow of your comments. A feast of seisin and a flow of soul.
There was a famous misunderstanding of REOs as oreos in the US Senate a few years ago, not involving any connections to Ireland that I know of.
But I suspect (I haven’t listened to it) involving Northern American pronunciations of “short” o combined with differences in syllabification, viz. OHR-ee-ohs versus AH-ree-ohs.
“haitch or” in Ireland
to my sensibility, these aren’t alternate letter names, just a different pronunciation of the same names – in the same spectrum as the new yorkese rendering /ej’tʃɑ:/.
brownie
to me, the only semantic category that brownies share with either cookies or cakes is “dessert”.
i agree entirely with JF about the category of “squares”/”bars” (not a term i can imagine using in ordinary life), which i think mainly exists as part of the organizing principle of many u.s. bakery and cafe display cases, which cluster sweets as cake-ish, pie-ish, cookie-ish, bar-ish, muffin-ish, multilayered/filled-pastry-ish (croissants, danish, rugelakh, etc), and pudding-ish (flan, chocolate mousse, etc). with things that confound that typology, like cannoli and tiramisu, i think the specific bakery’s stock determines where they’re placed.
I’m not sure that means that most AmEng speakers think of [brownies] as “ontologically” being a subgenre of cookies.
They do not. Speaking as an AmEng speaker, a brownie is in no way a cookie. I would be more inclined to think of it as a subgenre of cake. There is a actually a whole subcategory of american snacks/desserts – brownies, blondies, lemon squares – that needs a generic name but does not appear to have one. Maybe “snack cake” but that usually refers to industrially produced sweets.
Cookies you eat several of. Brownies you eat one of. Cake you eat a piece of.
(>>> Normatively. <<<)
Non-geographic variation in Austria for J /jeː/ ~ /jɔtː/ and Q /kʋeː/ ~ /kuː/. I’m used to using the first of each pair; only the second of each pair seems to be known in Germany
“Julius” and “Quelle”. You don’t use the Buchstabiertafel when spelling names?
Cookies you eat several of. Brownies you eat one of.
Already at a young age I was appalled at that discrimination against brownies. So at each opportunity I ate several, to make them feel more welcome.
They never took offense. Even when wasted on weed.
On the subject of squares/bars and transatlantic differences, we talked about flapjacks 12 years ago.
I should add that those are somewhat technical terms. You might find a chapter titled “Squares and Bars” in a cookbook, but nobody (in the approximate sense) says “I love squares” or “While you’re at the bakery, get some bars.”
No, but I wouldn’t find it weird to say “I love bar cookies,” just as one might say “I love sheet cake” (since I’m told that some people love sheet cake). If we’re getting scientific about it, Crustulumidae is the family, divided into true cookies and bar cookies; a brownie is Dulciquadra brunnea and a blondie is D. alba.
to me, the only semantic category that brownies share with either cookies or cakes is “dessert”.
None of those really fall into a category of dessert for me (cake maybe sometimes) – they’re things you eat with a cup of tea or coffee, not things you eat after your main course.
i tend to think Crustulumidae is polyphyletic, if not a wastebasket taxon, with members from both the (to stay vernacular) sliced and unsliced clades of the sheet-baked desserts. i’m interested, however, in the relationships among the various segments of the sliced clade: do sheet-cakes and bars form a monophyletic group? or are they still paraphyletic until we include tiramisu, ice-cream-cakes, and crumbles? or do the proposed utensil-eaten and hand-held clades have phylogenetic validity? (the conventional terminology seems useful, although given that the diachronic data are limited, i believe we’re limited in practice to a synthetic approach like that of HORG in their groundbreaking research on the Occupanids (and now the invasive Occlupanopsids).)
The vowel in question was a strikingly rounded [ɒ]; [ɒɹ] seems to be the speaker’s pronunciation of START. The closest the hearer has to [ɒɹ] is his NORTH/FORCE, which is close to [oɹ].
In a word, no.
(Disclaimer: I’ve never had magic ones.)
I’m aware such a thing exists, but I was never taught the whole thing – not even its name; I’m guessing from context here! – and can’t remember most of it. Berta, Cäsar, Dora is pretty much it. Anton. Maybe Karl…
“Coffee and squares” is what you have after a funeral.
I’ve never had magic ones
Lucy church amiably!
Pagoda, pagoda!
Buchstabiertafel
it took me an embarassing amount of time to work out why “ack emma” and “pip emma” meant what they do when i first encountered them – the idea of a gloss-word that didn’t actually begin with the letter it was indicating threw me, despite being acquainted with at least one person named emma who’s known to some as “M”. the idea of lengthening an pair of abbreviations that already contrast pretty strongly still strikes me as odd.
@rozele
I think the idea of military alphabets is to ensure a correct transmission when communication lines are noisy, shells are exploding, the plane is taking evasive action to avoid the exploding shells, etc. So instead of shortening A.M and P.M, which could sound like “aim” and “beam”, you lengthen them so they sound like nothing else.
There’s an Agatha Christie where a character wrote to her estranged brother years before saying that she’d had twins just after noon and called them Pip and Emma (and that’s basically all that’s known about them).
It took me many years to get the joke in that – I think I vaguely thought it had something to do with Great Expectations and dismissed it as Strange Things English People Do.
“Ack Emma” reflects WW1-era British Army practice. They subsequently got on board with the concept that it is useful to have the keywords be consistently spelled with the letter they represent as the first letter. So during the interwar period Ack Emma would have become (if not already a fixed phrase, and thus stuck regardless of broader changes …) “Apple Monkey.”* Then partway through WW2 when the Brits conformed their usage to US usage it would have become “Able Mike,” and then from and after 1956 the NATO-wide “Alfa Mike.”
The ways in which fixed idioms evolve out of such alphabets seems unpredictable. So, e.g., Viet Cong to VC to Victor Charlie is all straightforward, but then why that got clipped to “Charlie” rather than “Victor” or some third thing in 1960’s US military slang seems mysterious. I think some significant number of currently-living Americans understand “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” but my impression is that nonagenarian Korean War veterans did not in the old days use “William Tare Fox” to convey the same meaning, even if some such veterans with good memories could decode it with a moment’s thought.
*Which the Royal Navy was already doing in 1914-18, although maybe as “Apples Monkey.”
For bonus fun check out the saga here, with Nazi-era changes, post-war changes of the Nazi changes, unofficial variations, official-if-in-Austria variations, and a bald statement that things are “slightly different” in Switzerland and Liechtenstein with no details offered as to what those differences might be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_alphabet#Spelling_alphabet
I think it’s pretty straightforward why G. I. Joe did not want to refer to his enemy as “Victor.”
“Toc H” was still about in my youth, though I myself didn’t realise that the name was an initialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toc_H
@David E.: In the U.S. we just assumed it was hippies-on-drugs nonsense sounds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pow_R._Toc_H. Strange Things English People On Drugs Do, to modify slightly JenInEd’s analysis.
Überpunkt Ingelheim and Schräggestrichen Offenbach sound like Thomas Pynchon characters
Oh yes. I’ve seen it in use quite a few times.
Schrägstrich is what the slash is called.
I’m an American expat living in Donegal. I just asked my Northern Irish husband (from Omagh) what the difference between biscuits and cookies was. We’re in our 50s.
He said cookies were, “those American things. Maryland chocolate chip. And soft cookies”. Oatmeal raisin are absolutely biscuits. Jaffa Cakes are biscuits (contrary to legal classification, that confirms that for VAT purposes they are cakes). Brownies are brownies. The lemon curd cheesecake bars I sometimes make are squares. The pecan pie bars I sometimes make are pie. Cookies and brownies and squares and flapjacks are apparently subtypes of biscuits. Pie is not.
Then he got tired of being closely questioned and went back to playing Assassin’s Creed. I’ll update you when he decides what mandelbrot is.
If oatmeal raisin is not a soft cookie, what are soft cookies like?
@Biscia:
If we’re getting scientific about it, Crustulumidae is the family, divided into true cookies and bar cookies; a brownie is Dulciquadra brunnea and a blondie is D. alba.
You seem to be using the Gastronomical Species Concept, but as @rozele notes, there are other possibilities. I’ve heard that a forthcoming monograph will revise the Epidipniformes according to the Culinary Species Concept and place both Dulciquadra and Citriquadra in a family Butyrifusidae (or Nostalgidae) along with madeleines.
I had no idea what the “Maryland chocolate chip” cookies Speedwell’s Irish husband referred to were. And I grew up in a state adjacent to Maryland. They turn out upon investigation to be an entirely British product currently manufactured* by Burton’s Biscuit Company, which is reportedly “the UK’s number two biscuit maker.” You can maybe get them in the U.S. if you go to a imported-British-foods specialty retailer that sells Marmite. And perhaps also the “Fish ‘n’ Chips savoury snacks” alleged to also be manufactured by Burton’s.
Why some British marketing person first thought back in or about 1956 that “Maryland” would be a good brand name for cookies-or-biscuits sold to a British/Irish clientele is not clear to me. There are quite a lot of different sorts of foodstuffs that might be stereotypically associated with Maryland in the minds of other Americans, but that ain’t one of them.
*Quoth wikipedia “first produced by [J. Lyons & Co.]** in 1956 through its Blackpool subsidiary Symbol Biscuits” and then migrated into the Burton’s portfolio of brands decades later after a variety of corporate mergers and acquisitions.
**The employer a few years earlier of a young chemist named Margaret Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, although she reportedly worked on the ice cream side of the business.
“Insert random American placename here that people might have heard of.”
I think the name “Maryland” instills a superior feeling of “it was only to be expected”. A formerly upstart British colony is reduced to baking cookies for the imperial homeland, and delivering them at the trade entrance.
Also, “Maryland” has a comfortingly British sound (as opposed to, say, “New Mexico”).
Would the original Catholic inspiration of “Maryland” be more obvious in the British Isles? Certainly seems like a smart marketing move in 1950s Ireland or Liverpool (but maybe not in Norn Iron?)
You might already know that how long you can stand on one leg has been linked to your brain age ― the position involves coordinating different parts of your body and mind, making it uniquely useful as a marker of ageing.
I bet it’s primarily old people already who fuss about such a thing. The actual durations are insignificant. When you have nothing better to do than stand around on one leg, you’re already old and almost out the door.
Since “Sharp Dressed Man” is playing on the radio right now, my mind went back to the first time I consciously remember hearing the song. ZZ Top is one of* the bands that plays at the cafe in Space Quest. I remember from when I first played the game that I figured it was a real song and thus presumably a caricature of a real band, but I don’t think I knew the name “ZZ Top” or the members’ appearances at that age.
* Also featured are The Blues Brothers and a group of aliens playing the theme from Peter Gunn (which I knew better from another video game, Spy Hunter).
Brett’s comment is one of those that reveals generational-cohort differences because I can say with some confidence that I was aware of Zed Zed Top (not that we pronounced it that way in the Greater Philadelphia area) no later than the winter of ’79-’80, when I was in ninth grade, learning the rudiments of German grammar, and several tracks from their then-new Degüello LP were getting substantial airplay on the radio stations I listened to, especially “Cheap Sunglasses.” That album and the supporting tour marked their return to activity after an unusually extended (for the time) hiatus of almost two and a half years.
Which links back to an earlier point, because the last thing they’d done before that hiatus was their legendary-in-certain-circles “Worldwide Texas Tour,” which could have made them big stars in the U.K. six or seven years earlier than they in fact were had the tour in fact been “worldwide” as originally planned. Unfortunately, part of the elaborate staging for the tour involved having live animals up on stage with the band, with a traveling vet to look after them since that was outside the usual road crew’s skill set, but, as wikipedia tells the sad story: “Concerts in Europe, Japan, Australia, and Mexico were cancelled due to quarantine restrictions for buffalo.” (Due to an editing glitch, the same wiki article uses the quote “one of the most ambitious and bizarre tours in all of rock history” twice in different places, although it is a good quote.)
They couldn’t have ditched the buffalo for the tour? That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.
But look at all the publicity it generated. People are still talking about it 50 years later.
Rock-’n’-rollers being famous for their focus on the distant future.
You want them to, like, compromise the rigor and purity of their artistic vision just to make some stupid foreign bureaucrats happy? It was supposed to be a, um, um, Gesamtkunstwerk, if that’s the right Texas-dialect word, not just playing the songs on their own. They did do two nights in Honolulu, so apparently they got the livestock there and back.
@J.W. Brewer: It’s probably more of an individual age thing than generational. When I was ten, I didn’t know about ZZ Top (which also had a lot to do with the fact that my parents hadn’t bought any non-classical music recordings since “Pet Sounds”). However, by the time I was fourteen, I was familiar with ZZ Top and a lot of other bands. I certainly recognized ZZ Top the second time I encountered them in a science fiction work, Back to the Future, Part III.
Would the original Catholic inspiration of “Maryland” be more obvious in the British Isles?
Extrapolating from a sample of one, I very much doubt it. And in any case, if a new brand of exotic biscuits were exposed as part of an insidious Catholic plot, we would have thrown them on our Guy Fawkes bonfires in disgust. And would have written outraged letters to the Daily Telegraph to boot.
NO POPOVERY!
Why some British marketing person first thought back in or about 1956 that “Maryland” would be a good brand name for cookies-or-biscuits sold to a British/Irish clientele is not clear to me.
definitely odd, but not more so than Connecticut Muffin*, Boston Chicken**, and other bizarre naming decisions in the u.s. restaurant-chain world.
.
* bland, but surprisingly rustic, with a vague aura of tobacco?
** puritanical, with a hint of beans, chowder, or custard?
I found a YouTube video of the ZZ Top “Texas Worldwide Tour” that shows roadies extracting a rattlesnake from the shipping trunk it apparently lived in, but not how the snake was incorporated into the show. It was apparently considered dangerous enough that the trunk was opened using a pole to lift a rope tied to the handle, and then the snake was lifted out with what I might call tongs.
One article describes the attitude of the crowd in Pittsburgh (“the most horrible thing I’ve seen since World War II” is a genuine quote from a doctor) towards the opening act, Aerosmith — a barrage of beer bottles, cans and fireworks, and one Zed-Zed fan crawling under the stage to pull the plug on their sound system. Aerosmith exacted their revenge by destroying two of the Winnebagos that had been rented as their backstage rooms. Another doctor described the carnage as “only 36 people were taken to the hospital”, and the Pirates, playing the next day, complained of divots in the turf after one of the buffalo briefly escaped.
This appears to be the article to which Ryan referred: https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/music/2009/06/21/ZZ-Top-Aerosmith-concert-at-Three-Rivers-Stadium-was-one-crazy-day/stories/200906210207
In fairness, Aerosmith had multiple experiences in that era with people throwing fireworks at them during shows where they were the headliner so the culprits were not obviously disgruntled fans of some other act. The liner notes for their 1978-released double live album include a notation for one particular track specifically thanking everyone who *didn’t* throw fireworks at the stage during that specific show.
Rock-’n’-rollers being famous for their focus on the distant future.
Clearly Hat is not a Rush fan.
1978 was the year Aerosmith appeared in that atrocious Sgt Pepper film, I would have thrown fireworks and bottles at them as well.
@Vanya: Oh come on, they were the best thing in that movie! Alternatively, they weren’t even in the movie “as Aerosmith.” It was just that the members of that band had been hired as actors and then cast in the role(s) of the fictional “Future Villain Band,” who (the voiceover by I think George Burns solemnly warned us) intended to “poison young minds, pollute the environment, and subvert the democratic process.” Which again was obviously the least-bad role in what was admittedly a turkey of a screenplay.