“Double Zero Seven”

If I say it to you, would you be able to understand what I am saying?

The other day, I had a dinner together with Andrew, Beth, Ari, Juan, Mar annnnnd…… Maia. For some reason, we talked about Yuna Kim, the best female figure skater in the world at the moment, who is from South Korea. I talked, “She looks very flirting especially when she uses musics from double zero seven.” Everybody was looking at me puzzled, “What is double zero seven?” “You know the movie with James Bond. Double zero seven. Don’t you know that?” As soon as I said, they were all like, “Oh you mean, double O seven!” My reaction was, “What? It is the same thing, isn’t it?” “Well, it is! But, we do not say ‘double zero seven!’ It should be ‘double O seven!'” I talked about this to Jake and Jean. And Jean told me, “Maybe it is because in the movie they keep saying, ‘double O seven’ and people are so used to saying in that way.” Funny thing is I, as a Korean, learned to use ‘zero’ not to use alphabet ‘O’ to pronounce number 0. So, every time someone ask me my phone number, I always say like, “four zero zero……blah blah zero.” I wonder how many non-native English speakers ever learned to speak number 0 using alphabet O. To be honest, saying ‘ZERO’ is not easy. I think ‘Z’ is one of the hardest English alphabets to pronounce. It is really hard for me to pronounce correctly to distinguish Zac from Jack. (Zac! Have you noticed that I have hard time for this??) Maybe, you should better to practice to use alphabet ‘O’ to speak number 0 instead of using ‘ZERO.’ I mean it is really easy to pronounce and short and, most of all, people do understand what ‘double O seven’ means 🙂