Comments

Hi Folks — 5 Comments

  1. I used to moderate a US BBS, perhaps one of the most infamous ones, and I would spend most of my nights on it.

    This was back in oh 2003-2010. Sometimes towards the end of my sojourn there i happen to undertake a car journey with my Ol’ Man and his-far-too-young-for-his-aged-body Wife (actually I jest, they were and are genuinely in love). Chatting as we drove along the pair of them started to pick me up on my English:

    I said ‘cell phone’ instead of ‘mobile’, ‘ATM’ instead of ‘Hole-innda-wall ‘ and various other bits of Americania , such as ‘yay big’, that I had somehow subconsciously absorbed by typing with Americans for too long.

    3rd hand Americanisation, passive yank-ing -it’s a killer…grammatically speaking.

    • While a cell phone to me will always be something mounted on the wall of a prison, I use ATM as a matter of course.  It’s a modern invention just like the parts of a computer so it’s inevitable that the acronym will be used.

      One that really annoys me is the ubiquitous “guys”.  A guy is a [slang] bloke, or something to hold a tent up.  It is NOT a collective noun for a group of people, yet it is in everyday use even by broadcasters.

      Have a nice day.

  2. Dear Grandad,

    I heartily concur with your dislike and avoidance of the spellings used by our colonial cousins.  However, I’ve been told (but have no evidence for it) that they have retained the spellings, etc., of the Pilgrim Fathers: it’s we who have diverged over the centuries.  Even if true, this cannot explain hood/bonnet or boot/trunk (as cars were obviously not around then), nor can it justify such nonsense as tap/faucet.

    George Bernard Shaw proposed “rationalised spelling”, which would have omitted unsounded & doubled letters.  So though would become tho, ceiling selin, etc.  Thankfully we’ve avoided that!

  3. G’day GD,

    back in the day when a PC was an oversized keyboard and the monitor was a TV and the games came on cassette tape or floppy disk we had a game show here in Australia called Wheel of Fortune. The object of the game was to guess a word by revealing one letter at a time. I was a regular watcher and when a computer game version came out I managed to copy a copy. Bugger, the game didn’t work properly, a lot of the words were misspelt, which isn’t a good thing in a spelling game. Alas, unbeknown to me the game was based on the American version. Caveat Emptor!

    How did an arse become an Equus Asinus?

     

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