It appears that there *is* a zoo in zoology! Or at least, in zoological.
Raymond S. Wise
http://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd
is _zoological._ I was startled to find that after the usual listing
of the Received Pronunciation of the word, the OED listed (marked as
_pop._) the pronunciation beginning with /zu/.
After checking several dictionaries online, I noted that not even
Merriam-Webster had that pronunciation variant. However, the Wordsmyth
Educational Dictionary--Thesaurus, at
had only the pronunciation beginning with /zu/, and the _Cambridge
International Dictionary of English_ had both pronunciations, but as
British variants, the American variant they listed did not begin with
/zu/.
That pronunciation would seem, then, to be an accepted variant in
British English.
(The subject line of my post is a take-off on the title of a book by
Charles Harrington Elster, _There is no Zoo in Zoology, and Other
Beastly Mispronounciations: An Opinionated Guide for the Well-Spoken,_
New York : Collier Books, (C) 1988. Whether Mr. Elster would condemn
the above, or accept it as a dialectal variant, I do not know.)
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA