Once upon a time, the letter ‘z’ held a simple functionality. It made a sound wholly its own and didnt threaten other letters. ‘Z’-words tonally buzzed from the roofs of our mouths and under our teeth as bees finding their ways out through cracked porch doors; words like “zoo” and “zippity-doo-da” pollinated our vocabularies. And certain words like, like… “swell” and salsa” felt unencroached. They were happy times.
Then one day some linguistically lazy person decided that it was easier to say “bunz uv steel,” rather than “bunce uv steel.” More romantic or something. Anyway, this early kinship of the ‘s’ and ‘z’ was nothing too horrible. It was, in a way, practical, like wearing house slippers to get the paper.
It wasn’t until the entrepreneurs of the late 1980’s/ early 1990’s discovered this natural partnership between ‘s’ and ‘z’ and, with their Kutting Ej use of the language, prostituted out the letter ‘z’ (not to mention the solicitation of other letters) so that now we have gems such as “Kreative Kutz“, or “Wingz N Thingz“, and “Bobbyz Sex Toyz”. The experimentation with the letter ‘z’, along with big bangs, acid washed jeans, and “Alf“, later became veritable grounds for nostalgic blushing. But the letter ‘z’ couldn’t just slowly fade, as the others had, from metro culture to suburban to rural, then disappear. It had to go on living in noble names, such as “Ebenezer” and “Zona” , and so tarnishing them, as it further damned words such as “zilch” and “zit”. But when option presents itself, when a word uses a ‘z’ when it could use an ‘s’, like an unintentional cliche in an otherwise respectable poem, like a finger in your chili, like a turd in a pool, the letter ‘z’ should be extracted, forgotten about, disgarded like a pink, puffy-sleeved dress after prom, and replaced with the simple, classic, untarnished
“s”.