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.”
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