As in, x, y, zed. How strange it was to move to the US fifty years ago and realize that Americans did not know how to pronounce the last letter of the alphabet. Zee? Really? Well, that was then. Now I cannot understand why Canadians have not learned how to pronounce it after fifty years.
The story is that poutine originated in the 1950s in Warwick, Quebec, at a restaurant called Le Lutin qui rit. Upon being asked to add cheese curds to a customer’s fries, owner Fernand Lachance responded, “Ça va faire une maudite poutine,” or, “That’s going to make a dreadful mess.” So he smothered the concoction with gravy too.
Somehow it works.