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English Usage US vs. UK

Walter Ego said:
Please reference this thread.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=111270

Apparently I'm supposed to use British usage when I reference the screening of film in the UK. Is this a load of bollocks or what?
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Ach, quit whining.

This site has a lot of nationalities and lot of different standards of English. That's taken as read. It's not like I complain when you all refer to elevators or sidewalks. I've never once made any comments about the spelling of skeptic, color, or defense. I convert measurements into imperial in lieu of metric where it helps technical discussions. The only time I've queried "college" is when I need to be sure that they're not talking about what the UK would call secondary school, as opposed to university. These are used correctly, in context, and it would be madness to object.

You were posting a story about the UK, likely to be of interest only to Brits, and used an American term which was incorrect. I also have pointed out on previous occasion that there is no such paper as The Times of London, corrected the idiots that think there's someone called the Queen of England, or - and quite a few North American posters here are guilty of this - don't understand the difference between England and Britain/the United Kingdom.

I'm damned sure there would be raised eyebrows if UK posters started referring to the American "Parliament" or started calling your senior lawyers "QCs" and so on.
 
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Tricky said:
I was driving from my flat to the petrol station to clean my windscreen when I heard a noise from the gearbox. I went to raise the bonnet, when I saw that my tyre was flat, so I had to get the spare out of the boot.
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Close, but no prize! ;)

What would you use instead of "gearbox"? Or do you mean the clutch?
 
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Tricky said:
I was driving from my flat to the petrol station to clean my windscreen when I heard a noise from the gearbox. I went to raise the bonnet, when I saw that my tyre was flat, so I had to pull the spare out of the boot.
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I was driving from my apartment to the gas station to clean my windshield when I heard a noise from the ????????. I went to raise* the hood, when I saw that my tire was flat, so I had to pull the spare out of the trunk.

*Here in the UK we would usually open the bonnet not raise it.
 
US v. UK "English"

Regarding the "Theatre/Cinema" issue.

In the USA, from the early days of the movies to mid 20th century, films actually were commonly shown in theaters (note Webster's revised spelling) along with live musical stage shows. Every city had many such venues. The last of the breed is the venerable Radio City Music Hall in New York which still packs them in for its combined Film/Stage show productions. Hence the term "theater" accurately described where one might go to see a movie in the US.

also;

Regarding British "misusage" of an American word:

Aluminum - a metallic element first isolated, described and named by an American scientist, is pronounced AL-YOU-MIN-EE-UM by the Brits who just decided it needed an extra syllable!

and;
Most strangely:

The British expression to "take someone off" and the US "to put someone on" mean the same thing!!
 
Thinking in CT said:
Regarding British "misusage" of an American word:

Aluminum - a metallic element first isolated, described and named by an American scientist, is pronounced AL-YOU-MIN-EE-UM by the Brits who just decided it needed an extra syllable!
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However, IIRC, it was also called Aluminium in the US for a while and there was quite a debate about its spelling.

The British expression to "take someone off" and the US "to put someone on" mean the same thing!!
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Sorry, you've lost me there.
 
Architect said:
Ach, quit whining.

This site has a lot of nationalities and lot of different standards of English. That's taken as read. It's not like I complain when you all refer to elevators or sidewalks. I've never once made any comments about the spelling of skeptic, color, or defense. I convert measurements into imperial in lieu of metric where it helps technical discussions. The only time I've queried "college" is when I need to be sure that they're not talking about what the UK would call secondary school, as opposed to university. These are used correctly, in context, and it would be madness to object.
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His usage was also correct.

You were posting a story about the UK, likely to be of interest only to Brits, and used an American term which was incorrect.
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By your logic, if I post a news story that occurs in the UK, I should write "I'm really sceptical about this" or "that lift didn't work correctly" or else I'm being "incorrect"? His usage was correct in American English, and I really don't see what the location of the topic had to do with what usage should be more "correct". The comparison with an American Parliament is faulty, since such a thing doesn't even exist.

And then there's the fact that other Brits chimed in to say he was being perfectly clear, so you're pretty much alone in your pedantry here. ;)
 
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Thinking in CT said:
Regarding British "misusage" of an American word:

Aluminum - a metallic element first isolated, described and named by an American scientist, is pronounced AL-YOU-MIN-EE-UM by the Brits who just decided it needed an extra syllable!
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Really? Who was that then? My understand of the history differs to yours, it seems.

Besides, Aluminium is by far the most sensible spelling for the word given its location in the periodic table. And was actually the way Americans spelled it until Charles Martin Hall changed the spelling for an advert. If it's him you're referring to, he certainly was not the first to isolate, describe or name it, by some distance, and his patents all used the 'ium' spelling.

So, you have it backwards. An American 'decided' it needed one fewer syllable and the rest of the world took no notice.
 
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From Wikipedia (so caution maybe needed):

Nomenclature history

The earliest citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary for any word used as a name for this element is alumium, which Humphry Davy employed in 1808 for the metal he was trying to isolate electrolytically from the mineral alumina. The citation is from his journal Philosophical Transactions: "Had I been so fortunate as..to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium."[22]

By 1812, Davy had settled on aluminum, which, as other sources note,[citation needed] matches its Latin root. He wrote in the journal Chemical Philosophy: "As yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state."[23] But the same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, objected to aluminum and proposed the name aluminium, "for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound."[24]

The -ium suffix had the advantage of conforming to the precedent set in other newly discovered elements of the time: potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and strontium (all of which Davy had isolated himself). Nevertheless, -um spellings for elements were not unknown at the time, as for example platinum, known to Europeans since the sixteenth century, molybdenum, discovered in 1778, and tantalum, discovered in 1802.

Americans adopted -ium to fit the standard form of the periodic table of elements, for most of the nineteenth century, with aluminium appearing in Webster's Dictionary of 1828. In 1892, however, Charles Martin Hall used the -um spelling in an advertising handbill for his new electrolytic method of producing the metal, despite his constant use of the -ium spelling in all the patents[20] he filed between 1886 and 1903.[25] It has consequently been suggested that the spelling reflects an easier to pronounce word with one fewer syllable, or that the spelling on the flier was a mistake. Hall's domination of production of the metal ensured that the spelling aluminum became the standard in North America; the Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, though, continued to use the -ium version.

In 1926, the American Chemical Society officially decided to use aluminum in its publications; American dictionaries typically label the spelling aluminium as a British variant.
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OK here goes:

A grasshopper walks into a bar:

Bartender - "Hey, we have a drink named after you!"

Grasshopper - "You mean you have a drink named 'Al'?

Bartender - "Hey, don't put me on!"

A grasshopper walks into a pub -

Publican - "Ya know the Yanks 'ave a drink named after you."

Grasshopper - "You mean they 'ave a drink named 'Alfie'?

Publican - "Now c'mon, don't take me off!!"
 
Thinking in CT said:
OK here goes:

A grasshopper walks into a bar:

Bartender - "Hey, we have a drink named after you!"

Grasshopper - "You mean you have a drink named 'Al'?

Bartender - "Hey, don't put me on!"

A grasshopper walks into a pub -

Publican - "Ya know the Yanks 'ave a drink named after you."

Grasshopper - "You mean they 'ave a drink named 'Alfie'?

Publican - "Now c'mon, don't take me off!!"
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Sorry, I think you may be on thin ice here, I certainly don't recognise that usage.
 
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I remember being very confused once in a pub in Scotland when someone asked me if I was "pissed". I didn't think I looked particularly annoyed at the moment....
 
I bow before your clearly, more detailed scholarship on this issue. My memory as to my source on Aluminum is a 45 years ago reading of a World Book Encyclopedia article on Hall (of Oberlin College, Ohio) touted in that worthy publication as the "discoverer" of Al.
 
I think there's been a little bit of confusion in this thread. Let's just begin by defining some basic terms. I think we can all agree that, whatever language they may speak in England, it is most definitely not english.

I personally think it sounds a little like english (sometimes German can sound a little like english). Sometimes it's easy to become confused for a moment and think you're actually hearing english. But, you're not. "I've up and knackered my lorry, wot," is not english. It can't even be translated into english. It expresses concepts that english-speakers do not have the social foundation to grasp.

There is no sense arguing with the British on this issue because no matter how sensibly we lay out our arguments, let's face it, we're not going to understand their answer.
 
ravdin said:
I remember being very confused once in a pub in Scotland when someone asked me if I was "pissed". I didn't think I looked particularly annoyed at the moment....
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You know, pissed people piss me off.

Then again I had to think a bit when listening to the song Piano Man, because he uses 'stoned' in a rather uncommon context.

Why don't we all use Australian English and leave it at that. Then the pedantic Poms won't have to worry about the spelling, and the Yanks will be able to keep some of their crazy uses of words, and we can all go back to laughing at the (mostly) seppos on the CT forum.
 
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