I’m Canadian, and as a Canadian, you’re supposed to spell differently. Colour, Behaviour; you have to add those superfluous u’s. The whole thing is the fault of America, obviously. It sounds like something that Benjamin Franklin would do for the advancement of the colonies.

I say ‘zee’, not ‘zed’.

It’s a decision I made when we were learning the alphabet, way back in Kindergarten. I knew there was a different way to say the last letter. What if I did it differently, everyday, for the rest of my life, without any regards to the consequences of teachers correcting me or of getting beat up with hockey sticks? Everyone knew what Zee meant. We all watched Knightrider and A-Team and we knew the current year to date count of murders in Detroit (the cable stations used the Detroit affiliates of ABC, NBC, and CBS). I would never be misunderstood. And I stood by this principle for the rest of my life. I didn’t follow the American way for everything; I cannot converse in Fahrenheit, for example. I have no idea of what the weather is like at 58 in Fahrenheit at all, despite following the weather in the newspapers for years. Canadians as a whole do the same thing: I, and the other non-savants in Canada, do not know our weight in kilograms despite living in a metric country.

By saying ‘zee’, I could uncover the personality of other people. It was a way to get ‘tells’ out of people in an innocuous fashion. Some people were quite offended by this. It’s easier to say. It’s faster. For a time in my life when I was a teenager, it was the American way to do it — the better way. They had stealth bombers protected by marines with machine guns on the tarmac of the Minot, North Dakota air show. There are no machine guns in Canada. In the mind of a teenager, Q.E.D.

Bu!

I wish my language had this… a negative operand that is grammatically correct. Absolute brilliance, this thing is. English uses this a little bit, but it’s taken to its extremes in China. There all kinds of ways to use this word… some of my favorites include the “Is not is? (是不是)” variant, which is like saying “Is it?” in English. There’s the “Not Want (不要)” thing, which is brilliant in its brevity. And my favorite: “You Not Good (你不好)”. The opposite would be French, where one of dozens of phrases could be used to negate something. (Il n’est pas vrai, Je ne voudrais pas, and Vous n’êtes pas bonne would be the equivalent phrasings for the three previous phrases).

You could argue that English does have this, but try saying “Not want.” in front of a picture of the Queen of England. It’s impossible. Her image will know what you did and she will send the red coats after you to beat you up. You want that? Probably not.

I like it when the extraneous bits of a process are taken out, and what I see here is a mathematical tautology expressed in a single phenome. Awesome.

But what about George Orwell’s 1984 and the simplification of the language proposed by the authorities? Isn’t this the same kind of thing? Won’t we lose our expressiveness and ability to influence thought if we reduce our words to be as simplistic as possible? I don’t think so, as this is an aspect of language used to determine if it is true whether you want more potatoes or to determine how tired the other person is. You don’t need expressiveness in this case; you need the facts.