Our Leader’s Sacred Lisp

X. Con Buzzard, the founder of the Church of Ziontology, developed a tendency over the years to pronounce both the letters 'S' and 'Z' as the dental fricative 'th'. This is, of course, what most people might refer to as a lisp. However, Buzzard was not a natural born lisper. He had to work on it and he put his all into it. It was an intentional affectation, which he developed during his many gay sojourns to the ports of Torremolinos and Malaga during his time commanding the spiritual flagging ship "Lollipop" in the Mediterranean in the 1960s. As a result, Buzzard gradually tended to pronounce words like “spirit” as “thpirit”, "Ziontology" as "Thiontology" and "Zee-Org" as "The Org", "Zetan" as "Thetan" and so on. The technical term for this phonetic idiom in Spain is known as the "Ceceo Lisp", which is a term phonologists use to describe this particular dialectical peculiarity. For Buzzard, it seems to have been simply an acquired obsessive compulsive tick, which he meticulously and religiously cultivated. Why did he do it? Was it an attempt to fit in to the Costa del Sol club scene? Was it of some esoteric spiritual significance? Was it just an extremely long-lived-leg-pulling-shenanigans type of thing? Nobody knows for sure. However, although the standard English pronunciation of 'z' and 's' are perfectly acceptable in day-to-day usage, just to be safe, devout Ziontologists always take special care during formal Ziontological rituals and ceremonies to pay respect to Buzzard by always pronouncing 'S' and 'Z' with a slight lithp.