Z
The least-used letter in the English alphabet, and its rarity makes it specially attractive to people tasked with inventing buzzworthy words. For example, Generation Z; people born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s, a.k.a "zoomers".
Zoomers may be jealously scorned by Millennials for taking their place as the new youth. Indeed, Millennials might even take Shakespeare's view, when the Earl of Kent reminded the servant Oswald that he was as unnecessary as the letter z. ("Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!" King Lear, Act II, Scene II).
Yes, he said "zed". Often referred to as the British English name for the letter, when in fact most other countries also call the letter "zed". (The 5% of the world's population in the US call it "zee").
The 'patriotic' Z symbol became ubiquitous in 2022 and is pronounced as a hard-voiced "s" like the z in zero, zoo, zodiac, etc. Also as in Zapad, the Russian-Belarusian military exercise in 2021; and zillionaires, a reminder that it's the oligarchs who will benefit most from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. War is good for business.
(Of mild interest, Z is not in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. The last letter in their alphabet is ᴙ, pronounced like the Latin alphabet Y. The letter pronounced as z looks like a 3.)
Z became a stark pro-war symbol of President Putin's invasion of Ukraine; proudly displayed by politicians, sports personalities, car windows, and of course Russian tanks and other military vehicles for easy identification to avoid fratricide (friendly fire from their own forces).
The official excuse given by Russia for the invasion was to "de-Nazify" Ukraine and protect pro-Russian residents in eastern Ukraine subjected to "genocide"; a ridiculous excuse, since there had been no genocide in Ukraine. On the contrary, it was Russian invasion which was genocide.
The de-Nazification excuse is even more puzzling. Did Putin mean the Ukrainian Army's Azov Battalion in Donetsk, whose members' uniforms include an amalgam of the letters “N” and “I” which stands for “National Idea”, and happens to be similar to a neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol? Far from being Nazi, ethnic Jews have served in Azov's ranks
Or did he mean the staunchly patriotic pro-Russian Novorossiya Party and the armed hard-line Wagner mercenaries in the same area, both of whom proudly claim to be far-right extremists? The private Wagner army, reportedly named after Hitler’s favourite composer, was founded by Dmitry Utkin, a self-styled Nazi.
If Putin really wanted to go against Nazis, he would have started in his country before bombing an entire nation of over 40 million innocent civilians.
The real reason, of course, was to recreate the Soviet Union and the tactics are eerily similar to their 1939 invasion of Poland with the then Nazi Germany; the USSR’s ‘liberation campaign’ land grab, after Stalin and Hitler made a pact to carve up Polish territory.
And so it goes on, generation after generation of insane tyrants who believe they will not only get rewarded in Heaven for using violence to sort out the world's problems, but also believe they will receive global praise in the process.
"Those who take up the sword will perish by the sword" Jesus Christ, c.AD30 Matt. 52:52.
As Shakespeare pointed out, the world can be an infinitely better place without Z.
