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Originally Posted by getbak
The storyline reason for this is that in their world, the concept of zombies didn't exist prior to the outbreak, so the word simply didn't exist for the people to use.
The real reason is that The Walking Dead started out as a comic book and Marvel had a character called The Zombie that Stan Lee created in the 1950s and was featured in his own series in the 70s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_(comics)
So, it was easier for Robert Kirkman to avoid using the term zombie in The Walking Dead than it was to worry about getting sued by Marvel (or paying them for the use of the word). Oddly enough, Kirkman later worked on the Marvel Zombies series of comics dealing with zombified versions of the Marvel superheroes. |
It's also just a general unspoken rule in zombie culture for the world they're written in to have no prior knowledge of zombies. There are a couple exceptions out there though. Zombieland comes to mind.