View Message

I've only ever heard the SEES-l version in an American context - very rarely, on CNN news, but first in the 1974 Great Gatsby movie, where someone - Tom perhaps, or Gatsby himself - is saying the names of party guests out loud and at least one of them or possibly two were SEES-ls. I was amazed, because my late father was one of the last of the South African Cecils and also because of Cecil John Rhodes, an English immigrant to South Africa during the gold rush who became politically and financially notorious. So I imagine that SESS-l is the British form (my grandparents were Brits).