Z is for Zed

So, as many of you may be aware, in England 'zees' are 'zeds'. Now, I think in general this is actually a perfectly sensible way to pronounce the letter Z. I can't tell you how many times I've spelled my name for someone at a reception desk and they immediately start searching their files under 'C'... So then you have to spell your name 'Zee as in zebra, ee, cee, kay,...' And being able to just say 'Zed ee cee kay' certainly speeds things up and avoids lots of confusion. On the flip side, if I slip up and say 'Zee as in zebra' here I get a very confused look for a second before they think to themselves 'silly American' and move on. So I am all in favor of moving to the 'zed' system.

However, the Brits are weird about their zeds in other ways. They seem extremely averse to using them. Stabilize becomes stabilise, analyze becomes analyse, fertilize becomes fertilise, etc. In fact, unless the z is an integral component of the word (for example, as in zebra), there's a good chance the Brits use an s instead. So what got me thinking about this (again) is that I have just completed a 25-page homework assignment (hooray! thus ends my homework requirement FOREVER!!), and the word processor on my computer in the engineering department will convert things like labor to labour but for some reason doesn't convert fertilize to fertilise. So I just did a search of my document for 'z', and in most cases replaced it with 's'. I was just going to leave it as is, proud of my American heritage and all that, but since the word processor had already changed all the o's to ou's, and I remembered reading for professional journals you are typically allowed to use either American OR British usage, but you may not use BOTH, I thought it would look better if I made everything British. This of course assumes that there aren't other hidden usages I don't know about and completely missed...