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While zed in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet is written differently - and looks like a 3 - most Russians recognise Latin letters.

Her work may not have entailed much glamour, or glamor, as she slogged her way from “eh to zed,” as a reporter for the Globe and Mail once joked.

It’s a testament to the screenwriters that between them they have made this friendship into a three-dimensional, A to zed story.

At a conference in downtown Manhattan, I met the founder of the famous though usually pointless series of talks—it rhymes with “zed”—and we had a great discussion.

He tilted it in the failing light, admiring the zed- like g, the curly b, and the curved t, like the blade of a plough.