A column brought to you by letter Z

A few weeks ago I did a column on words that start with the high-scoring Scrabble letter J, and made mention that I planned to do columns on the other three, Q, X and that wonderful letter Z, which, as far as I know, is the only letter of the alphabet that has two pronunciations. That?s right, some people don?t pronounce it ?Zee.? I?m sure my friend Wendy Curran, wife of ?Hot Dog Man? Brian, knows exactly what I?m talking about.

But more on that later. (Isn?t the suspense killing you? Hey, no cheating now. Don?t look ahead.)

First of all, after my last column, some people chided me on the fact I didn?t mention just how much these letters are worth in Scrabble. So I will rectify that omission now. J and X are worth 8 points each, while Q and Z are worth 10. The next highest letter is K, worth 5 points. Of course, some folks also asked me why those are the highest scoring letters. Now, though I love the game, I?m no Scrabble expert, but it seems to me there are basically two reasons.

The first is pretty obvious, there are fewer words in the language that contain these letters. A look in the dictionary at the words that begin with the letters Q, X, and Z, in particular, show that the pickings there are pretty slim. A few pages each in most non-comprehensive dictionaries. The list of words beginning with the letter J is a quite a bit more extensive, but still fairly thin. So that?s one reason, the number of words available when one of those letters is drawn.

The second reason is a vagary of the game itself. It has to do with the frequency of the letters in the game, in other words, the number of tiles with those letters on them. See, here?s the thing, and this is probably something that most Scrabble enthusiasts know, the letters J, K, Q, X and Z appear on only one tile each. That?s right, if you have the tile with the letter X no one is going to play xylophone without your help. (Pun intended. Bad pun I?ll admit, but hey, it?s a pun. And a musical pun at that. I mean, you can?t beat that with a xylophone mallet. OK. I?ll stop now).

Of course, there are lots of words that have these high score letters within them, but those don?t interest me for the purpose of these columns. I?m limiting myself to words that begin with these letters.

Anyhow, back to the letter Z. Here in America we pronounce it ?Zee,? but pretty much all of the other English speakers in the world pronounce it ?Zed,? which really makes sense since ?Zed? is derived from the original Greek ?zeta? which became ?zede? in old French, and from there to ?zed? in English. Now, if you watch many British TV shows or movies you?ve probably heard it pronounced that way at one time or another.

Of course some people may be thinking, ?Hmm, why did they change it like that?? Well, the fact is, they didn?t. We did.

And why did we change it? According to some it?s because we had a major falling out with the people who pronounced it like that. We called it the American Revolution, and apparently after that, the last thing any American wanted was to sound British. So it became ?Zee.?

Oddly enough there were a number of other pronunciations in different dialects, including zad, zard, ezod, izzard (my favorite), and uzzard.

According to the Concise Oxford Companion, ?The modification of zed to zee appears to have been by analogy with bee, dee, vee, etc.? One kind of gets the idea that this isn?t the most important letter of the alphabet, not only because of the haphazard attention to its pronunciation, but also because there aren?t that many words which use the last letter in the alphabet.

Anyhow, all this pronunciation stuff is making me tired. Think I?ll just go home and catch some Z?s. (More on that next time.)

Charlie Johnson is news editor of the Standard and can be reached at 473-2191.