Having grown up in the US with what I would consider a higher than average exposure to the early 2000s internet, at least compared to other peers my age, much of my ability to read and write actually came directly from social media, instant messengers and online games rather than books. This meant I often found myself struggling with spelling errors in English class which sadly resulted in deducted points from my essays.
I eventually came to realize many of my spelling "errors" were actually due to my exposure to the British spellings for many common words I would see online, like color/colour or behavior/behaviour for example. Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
To this day I still inconsistently use all spelling variants, and curse Noah Webster for his half assed attempt at regional spelling reform. In practice my phone just auto corrects them without me noticing though.
> Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
I can see the teacher's perspective here. I don't think it's unreasonable for teachers to mark this down, though I don't think your request to get back the points was unreasonable either.
Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you. Using language constructs that are unnatural for your audience can distract them and disrupt their flow. You don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point. This friction gets in the way of your point, thus ultimately hurting your own cause in addition to wasting their time. So when you keep doing that on your assignments and exams, you're effectively showing that you haven't mastered this skill -- and so it's not unreasonable for your grade to reflect that.
> Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you
Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
> don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point
Fair point. At the very least, one should be aware of the different usages.
> Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
Not sure what you mean by "distinguish". But just because you understand something that doesn't mean it can't slow you down, distract you, or be detrimental some other way.
If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
> If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
Why though? I think you missed my point with the rationale for this. See below.
> But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
That makes perfect sense though? The point wasn't "act American because you're in America", the point was "they're trying to teach you to communicate with {whatever audience they believe you will most often find yourself needing to cater to in the future}". Obviously in Europe they deem that to be British-English speakers. In America it'd obviously be American-English. etc.
I once was talking wit some british people whilst in california and said "oh you can throw that garbage in the trash". They laughed and said it sounded really coarse, what did you do with it after? "It goes into a truck which takes it to the dump. Why, what do you say?" "We say you put your rubbish in the bin and the lorry takes it to the tip" which did sound more pleasant.
> It was early in April in the year ’83 that I woke one morning to find
Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. “Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,” said he, “but it’s the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you.”
See also: "ejaculation" used to be synonymous with "exclamation" and it's used heavily all across the Sherlock stories eg
"The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
(Note that my HN name is the same as my real name, without the space).
On my first (and only) visit to Australia I got stopped at passport control. The security bloke took my passport and looked at it. Then kept looking at it, in silence. His face was straight and sour, but his shoulders were ... twitching. This went on for more than a couple of minutes until, finally, he looked up from the passport, stared into my eyes and asked: "Is that your real name?" Confused, I nodded. He handed me back my passport and waved me through - to his credit, the man never smiled or laughed at me, but I could see it had taken him a lot of effort to maintain his control.
A day later I learned about the Wombat Joke. I grew to hate the Wombat Joke. I'd love to visit Australia again, but I'll probably use a false passport next time.
How curious! (I feel that I've observed the Britishization of the word "curious" in my lifetime. As a child, it meant only interested, intrigued. Now it also means strange or bizarre.)
This might be my fault. I was in Charlottesville for a few months about 16 years ago doing some work for a startup, hanging out in my off hours with a group of sorority girls who had worked for me in London when I’d been an impresario.
I say (or rather, said, as this episode made me very conscious of it) “hmm, curious” almost reflexively when working on something. They aped me. They partied, they spread the meme. Within a week I was suddenly overhearing people in cafes and gas stations going “hmm, curious” and by the time I left town I felt like I was living in a poorly written Monty Python sketch (or perhaps a Lovecraft bit), as an epidemic of “mmm, curious” had taken over the townspeople and the UVA student body. The latter all then went home at the end of the year, towards the end of my stay there, and spread it to every corner of the U.S.
When I went back a year later, they were all still at it.
I guess this ties in with the whole “teenage girls introduce new language” piece a few weeks back.
As an Aussie I get a kick out of seeing Australianisms get picked up in the global vernacular. No worries seems to be increasing common outside of Australia, and cooked (to describe something that's fucked up) also seems to be prolific on social media these days.
As an American, I always find it kind of ironic that Aussie colloquialisms and colloquialisms my Texan grandparents used overlap, likely because of being drawn from a similar pool of British & Irish expats some 100-150 years ago. "I reckon" is one that comes to mind first.
It's not occurred to me in ages that "no worries" could be Aussie in origin, thought it was just a degradation of "don't worry about it" here in Canada, or picked up from the Lion King, but we do have a ton of aussies here, at least on the West Coast, so it seems plausible enough. I guess we just don't add "mate" as commonly.
Somehow the fact you chose word "vernacular" comes across as amazingly Australian to me. It's like Australians instinctively know that you need to sprinkle your sentences with some interesting vocabulary every so often. I'm probably making no sense to anyone but myself but I find the Australian manner of speaking to be sharp swings between the most basic brutish, often vulgar, english to the complete opposite. Like, you'll hear someone blurt out "Slow down you cunt, These pills they've got me taking take are praying bloody murder on my fucking knees" and then effortlessly it just flows into something like "That said it's not worth grieving or shedding too many a tear over. They've done a marvelous job at alleviating my various ailments. My wife's taking them to and it's all but cured her rheumatism".
Juice Media's "honest government ads" are a goldmine for Aussie-speak,
"colossal shitfuckery" so perfectly nails the dank machinations of
Australian tech and politics.
> "In the future" refers to a general or specific time that has yet to occur, and "in future" is used to mean "from now on". (The recent business jargon, on both sides of the Atlantic, is "going forward".)
Funnily enough, I think 'going forward'/'going forwards' is a transatlantic difference?
According to the O.E.D. it's been used in the US in a stock market context since 1935.
As an example of how seriously the British take their language, here's a shortened entry for the phrase "run-up".
1.The act of running up to a certain point; esp.
1.a Coursing. The race between two greyhounds up to the first turn or wrench of the hare.
1834 Thacker Courser's Comp. I. 134 One dog is sometimes behind the other in the first run up to the hare
1.b The act of taking or sending a ball up to the goal or into a position for final play. Also attrib. Chiefly in Golf.
1897 Outing XXX. 484/1 Foster‥, after a clean run from 'way down the field, puts the ball through the uprights.‥ The excitement of the run-up has been intense.
1.c A run made in preparation for jumping, throwing, etc., in Athletics; in Cricket, the bowler's approach to the bowling crease before delivery.
1897 Encycl. Sport I. 52/2 Pace in the run-up supplies the impetus; spring enables the jumper to lift himself into the air.
1.d = run-in | RAF lingo.
1942 R.A.F. Jrnl. 27 June 8 Another Stirling and a Wellington adopted almost identically the same run-up as ourselves.
1.e A period of time or series of occurrences leading up to some important (freq. political) event; an action which prepares the way for one on a larger scale.
1966 Sunday Times 20 Nov. 48/2 The Petit Palais show offers, also, invaluable evidence in its drawing section of the ways in which Picasso manoeuvred during the crucial run-up to the ‘Demoiselles d'Avignon’.
1968 Listener 5 Dec. 761/1 The run-up to the election of Oxford's new Poetry Professor has aroused a good deal of mirthful interest
2 Bookbinding. (See quot. 1875.) Also attrib.
1875 Knight Dict. Mech. 2004/2 Run-up, a fillet-mark which runs from head to tail on the back, without mitering with the horizontal cross fillets on the panels.
1880 J. W. Zaehnsdorf Bookbinding 131 With a ‘run-up’ back, the edge of the leather round the end papers is to‥have a roll run round it in gold.
3 On the U.S. Stock Market, a rapid increase in the price or value of a commodity. Now also in gen. use.
1935 Sun (Baltimore) 13 Apr. 17/8 Corn advanced to 1 to 13/4 cents a bushel, but cotton was reactionary after Thursday's run-up.
1942 Ibid. 1 Oct. 21 Laclede gas preferred had a runup of 6½ points.
TLDW; We have multiple different root languages in English city names, and you are only thinking one dimensionally, with the Roman Latin root. Cirencester is a good example, pronounced how you might expect while further north the town names get more germanic, and eventually Scandinavian.
It's a funny example but to be fair to the British that also happens in other Germanic languages and it also happens a hell of a lot more in Romance languages.
There's two I like in particular as an American, but mostly because their counterparts are ruined.
'Good on you' is the biggest one. 'Good for you', especially in text, to me comes across as bitter or sarcastic because of how often it's used that way, whereas the other doesn't.
'Mate', while I don't use it, is a solid word. We have buddy, pal, guy, etc, but again, they can each have their own negative connotation. Maybe 'mate' does too, but it always seemed like a neutral, friendly word.
Having grown up in the US with what I would consider a higher than average exposure to the early 2000s internet, at least compared to other peers my age, much of my ability to read and write actually came directly from social media, instant messengers and online games rather than books. This meant I often found myself struggling with spelling errors in English class which sadly resulted in deducted points from my essays.
I eventually came to realize many of my spelling "errors" were actually due to my exposure to the British spellings for many common words I would see online, like color/colour or behavior/behaviour for example. Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
To this day I still inconsistently use all spelling variants, and curse Noah Webster for his half assed attempt at regional spelling reform. In practice my phone just auto corrects them without me noticing though.
> Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
I can see the teacher's perspective here. I don't think it's unreasonable for teachers to mark this down, though I don't think your request to get back the points was unreasonable either.
Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you. Using language constructs that are unnatural for your audience can distract them and disrupt their flow. You don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point. This friction gets in the way of your point, thus ultimately hurting your own cause in addition to wasting their time. So when you keep doing that on your assignments and exams, you're effectively showing that you haven't mastered this skill -- and so it's not unreasonable for your grade to reflect that.
> Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you
Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
> don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point
Fair point. At the very least, one should be aware of the different usages.
> Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
Not sure what you mean by "distinguish". But just because you understand something that doesn't mean it can't slow you down, distract you, or be detrimental some other way.
> just because you understand something that doesn't mean it can't slow you down, distract you, or be detrimental some other way
Sure. I'm just sceptical that errant signal isn't lost in the background of the American dialect's regional heterogeneity.
If I ask someone in San Francisco "what colour pop" they want, the friction won't come from the "u."
A better example for why regionality matters: what does "pants" refer to?
If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
> If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
Why though? I think you missed my point with the rationale for this. See below.
> But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
That makes perfect sense though? The point wasn't "act American because you're in America", the point was "they're trying to teach you to communicate with {whatever audience they believe you will most often find yourself needing to cater to in the future}". Obviously in Europe they deem that to be British-English speakers. In America it'd obviously be American-English. etc.
its also entirely inconsequential after school, so do your job and follow the district mandates
but for the rest of us, the point of language is to convey a shared concept, and if the sender and receiver are doing that then mission accomplished
I once was talking wit some british people whilst in california and said "oh you can throw that garbage in the trash". They laughed and said it sounded really coarse, what did you do with it after? "It goes into a truck which takes it to the dump. Why, what do you say?" "We say you put your rubbish in the bin and the lorry takes it to the tip" which did sound more pleasant.
iunno, the last time I asked if I could bum a fag, it was made very clear to me that UK lingo has NOT conquered the US
Same when I asked my neighbor to “knock me up in the morning.”
That was a very weird morning…
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocker-up)
Word of warning then - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LDsfzJXGAo8
> It was early in April in the year ’83 that I woke one morning to find Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. “Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,” said he, “but it’s the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you.”
See also: "ejaculation" used to be synonymous with "exclamation" and it's used heavily all across the Sherlock stories eg
"The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
For a list see https://thetaleofsirbob.blogspot.com/2013/07/watson-and-othe...
If you mentally insert some commas some of them are really funny.
A word of warning as a Brit in Australia. You'll get funny looks when talking about routers and root!
(Note that my HN name is the same as my real name, without the space).
On my first (and only) visit to Australia I got stopped at passport control. The security bloke took my passport and looked at it. Then kept looking at it, in silence. His face was straight and sour, but his shoulders were ... twitching. This went on for more than a couple of minutes until, finally, he looked up from the passport, stared into my eyes and asked: "Is that your real name?" Confused, I nodded. He handed me back my passport and waved me through - to his credit, the man never smiled or laughed at me, but I could see it had taken him a lot of effort to maintain his control.
A day later I learned about the Wombat Joke. I grew to hate the Wombat Joke. I'd love to visit Australia again, but I'll probably use a false passport next time.
Hmm, lorry takes it to the tip sounds dirty to me.
It is very dirty, and they just dump load after load right on the tip.
How curious! (I feel that I've observed the Britishization of the word "curious" in my lifetime. As a child, it meant only interested, intrigued. Now it also means strange or bizarre.)
Huh. Curiouser and curiouser.
The meaning of strange-comedic-unusual-interested is... curiously... conflated in several languages (even being a false friend in some to others).
I think the default understanding here (UK) would still be the same. I wonder if it’s Sherlock making the other understanding more popular.
This might be my fault. I was in Charlottesville for a few months about 16 years ago doing some work for a startup, hanging out in my off hours with a group of sorority girls who had worked for me in London when I’d been an impresario.
I say (or rather, said, as this episode made me very conscious of it) “hmm, curious” almost reflexively when working on something. They aped me. They partied, they spread the meme. Within a week I was suddenly overhearing people in cafes and gas stations going “hmm, curious” and by the time I left town I felt like I was living in a poorly written Monty Python sketch (or perhaps a Lovecraft bit), as an epidemic of “mmm, curious” had taken over the townspeople and the UVA student body. The latter all then went home at the end of the year, towards the end of my stay there, and spread it to every corner of the U.S.
When I went back a year later, they were all still at it.
I guess this ties in with the whole “teenage girls introduce new language” piece a few weeks back.
As an Aussie I get a kick out of seeing Australianisms get picked up in the global vernacular. No worries seems to be increasing common outside of Australia, and cooked (to describe something that's fucked up) also seems to be prolific on social media these days.
As an American, I always find it kind of ironic that Aussie colloquialisms and colloquialisms my Texan grandparents used overlap, likely because of being drawn from a similar pool of British & Irish expats some 100-150 years ago. "I reckon" is one that comes to mind first.
It's not occurred to me in ages that "no worries" could be Aussie in origin, thought it was just a degradation of "don't worry about it" here in Canada, or picked up from the Lion King, but we do have a ton of aussies here, at least on the West Coast, so it seems plausible enough. I guess we just don't add "mate" as commonly.
I would guess it was popularised by "Crocodile Dundee" in the 80s, so that's long enough to feel native to a lot of people.
Somehow the fact you chose word "vernacular" comes across as amazingly Australian to me. It's like Australians instinctively know that you need to sprinkle your sentences with some interesting vocabulary every so often. I'm probably making no sense to anyone but myself but I find the Australian manner of speaking to be sharp swings between the most basic brutish, often vulgar, english to the complete opposite. Like, you'll hear someone blurt out "Slow down you cunt, These pills they've got me taking take are praying bloody murder on my fucking knees" and then effortlessly it just flows into something like "That said it's not worth grieving or shedding too many a tear over. They've done a marvelous job at alleviating my various ailments. My wife's taking them to and it's all but cured her rheumatism".
No wuckers, coming soon?
I'm finna grab that phrase with glee, and stow it in my tucker bag.
I think more Aussie way to say that would be:
'I'm heaps keen to chuck that saying into the old tucker bag'...
Yeah nah.
For real life?
(Bluey. The single greatest contribution to exporting Australian culture.)
Juice Media's "honest government ads" are a goldmine for Aussie-speak, "colossal shitfuckery" so perfectly nails the dank machinations of Australian tech and politics.
Now with added US colossal shitfuckery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHuMjIhS6t0
> "In the future" refers to a general or specific time that has yet to occur, and "in future" is used to mean "from now on". (The recent business jargon, on both sides of the Atlantic, is "going forward".)
Funnily enough, I think 'going forward'/'going forwards' is a transatlantic difference?
I've never been so chuffed to read an article...
The article starts off with "run-up." What's the origin of that? I have heard of run-up in cricket.
According to the O.E.D. it's been used in the US in a stock market context since 1935.
As an example of how seriously the British take their language, here's a shortened entry for the phrase "run-up".
As an Aussie cricket comes to mind, you run-up from a standing start before releasing the ball.
I think equivalent for US would be "Wind-up" (at least I think pitchers in Baseball performs a wind-up before releasing the ball)
How about the spelling of the word aluminium?
Can you say that out loud in a sentence please?
Yeah, they at least pronounce aluminium like they spell it. It's not a "Leicester" piss take.
Hopefully Map Men might help with this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4
TLDW; We have multiple different root languages in English city names, and you are only thinking one dimensionally, with the Roman Latin root. Cirencester is a good example, pronounced how you might expect while further north the town names get more germanic, and eventually Scandinavian.
The video helps it makes sense.
> It's not a "Leicester" piss take.
It's a funny example but to be fair to the British that also happens in other Germanic languages and it also happens a hell of a lot more in Romance languages.
We say it how we spell it and so do americans.
There's two I like in particular as an American, but mostly because their counterparts are ruined.
'Good on you' is the biggest one. 'Good for you', especially in text, to me comes across as bitter or sarcastic because of how often it's used that way, whereas the other doesn't.
'Mate', while I don't use it, is a solid word. We have buddy, pal, guy, etc, but again, they can each have their own negative connotation. Maybe 'mate' does too, but it always seemed like a neutral, friendly word.
> Maybe 'mate' does too, but it always seemed like a neutral, friendly word.
It can be negative, definitely, if said with the right intonation.
Now time to conquer CSS.
[dead]
The first non-shite thing I’ve seen from the Graun in years.