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Well this is intensely disappointing. I shall have to find something else to be snobby about - I feel like I have been living a lie, I have spent countless hour
by rbg246 6y ago
Well this is intensely disappointing. I shall have to find something else to be snobby about - I feel like I have been living a lie, I have spent countless hours changing the dictionary in windows or osx to be UK English just so it didn't correct me on this.
What other spelling idiosyncrasies are there that I can get on my high horse about?
- throwanem 6y agoHow about webpages that flow their text across multiple columns?
- Lammy 6y agoVery impressive text justification / linebreaking algorithm though. I didn't know FrontPage could do that! <meta content="Microsoft FrontPage 12.0" name="GENERATOR" />
- throwanem 6y agoThere's a longstanding and widely implemented CSS working draft for columnar text, that even IE 10 apparently supports. No idea if this page is actually using it, since I'm not going upstairs just to pull up this page and poke around its stylesheet, but I could imagine Expression Web (aka Frontpage 12) making it available. edit: Being upstairs anyway for other reasons, I've just had a look. It's just two <div> elements as columns in an old-school grid style system that predates CSS Grid. Text is flowed within the columns using a text-align: justify; rule, so the impressiveness of the result is properly credited to the browser rather than the site design.
- RandomBacon 6y agoI just use: <p style="columns:3;">
- throwanem 6y agoYes, that's specified in the WD I mentioned. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-multicol-1/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-multicol-1/
- RandomBacon 6y agoI'm sorry. Thank you for pointing it out.
- throwanem 6y agoYou've nothing for which to apologize that I can see! If anything, I was unduly curt, and I'm sorry for that.
- vr46 6y agoOn the contrary, I feel this opens up whole new areas for snootiness - some years ago a colleague jokingly berated me via group email for my ‘American spelling’ and my riposte was the Wikipedia entry for Oxford Spelling which put an end to that skirmish.
- rbg246 6y agoI like it, it's a double down on snootiness! It's not over!
- Lammy 6y agoMy English spelling idiosyncrasy pet peeve is how correlation is spelled with two 'r's and one 'l' but corollary is spelled with one 'r' and two 'l's
- kmm 6y agoIt might be completely useless, but that has an etymological reason. Correlation derives from con + relation, where the n assimilated to the following r. On the other hand, corollary ultimately derives from corona with some diminutive suffix containing a double l.
- Lammy 6y agoNeat!
- williamdclt 6y agoAnd topical, double points!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- quietbritishjim 6y agoHere's something else to get worked up about. One overcorrection I often see (even elsewhere in these comments) is "focussed". This is an attempt to avoid the American tenancy never to double consonants in words with the "ed" ending, but it's not correct in British English to always double the consonant. Instead, the rule is too double the letter when the last syllable is stressed, so "focussed" would sound like foCUSSED whereas the normal pronunciation is FOcused. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule.
- ubercow13 6y agoMy intuition was that the doubling of the consonant was to prevent the modifying effect that the e would normally have. For example bat->batted. Bated doesn’t work because it looks like it should be pronounced the same as baited.
- function_seven 6y agoThis makes sense. If I didn't already know the word, I could see mistakenly pronouncing “focused” to rhyme with “accused” (i.e. fohk-YOO-zed )
- hnzix 6y agoAluminum / aluminium and pronouncing herbal as "errbal". Also "cracking" windows.
- rbg246 6y agoI do however admire the American spelling of aluminium it does a great job of making alluminum sound more exotic.
- pacaro 6y agoI've noticed that American and British pronunciation of French loan words tend to be inverted, wherever one is using approximate french pronounciation, the other has anglicized In the kitchen, the American standard favors the French: herb (herb vs urb) and filet (fill-it vs fill-eh) In a car, it is reversed: chassis (shassy vs chassy) and coupe (coop-eh vs coop) Others that differ include (all where Brits favour a francophone pronounciation) papier maché, en route, double entendre
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoWhat drives me nuts is RP speakers that aspirate leading H's but insist on using the wrong article before them anyway. And the Americans that foolishly imitate them.
- pacaro 6y agoThe whole "an hotel" nonsense?
- open-source-ux 6y ago"What other spelling idiosyncrasies are there that I can get on my high horse about?" Not spelling, but I prefer the way of referring to brackets in the UK. It's simpler and logical: () = brackets [] = square brackets {} = curly brackets In the US: () = parentheses (what a mouthful :-) [] = brackets {} = braces
- Lammy 6y ago"parens" / pəˈrɛnz /
- Zach_the_Lizard 6y agoI've heard "square brackets" here in the US. I'd also use the term "curly braces" over just "braces" but either is acceptable.
- amelius 6y agoI thought "<" was for "bra" and ">" for "ket", so "<>" for bra(c)kets? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation
- open-source-ux 6y ago<> = angle brackets (At least that's the UK usage I'm familiar with)
- thaumasiotes 6y agoReally? I would have identified "angle brackets" as ⟨⟩.
- open-source-ux 6y agoYes, those are angle brackets but they are not listed on an ASCII keyboard so most people use the < (less than) and > (greater than) symbols and these are still referred to as angle brackets (for example when referring to HTML or XML tags). There is a difference between how brackets are referred to in mathematics[1] vs usage in written everyday English: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/AngleBracket.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/AngleBracket.html [1] Another interesting difference between UK and US English: UK = Maths (shorthand for mathematics) US = Math
- throw0101a 6y ago> What other spelling idiosyncrasies are there that I can get on my high horse about? Long and short number scales? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales Is "billion" a thousand million (10^9) or a million million (10^12)? Numberphile video: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ&t=5m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ&t=5m30s TL;DR: billion = bi-million = two of 10^6 = 10^{6x2} = 10^12. trillion = tri-million = 10^{6x3} = 10^18, and not 10^12. quadrillion, pent….
- rbg246 6y agoYes I like this. I haven't gone there and I may end up with no friends but I feel I may start correcting others on their incorrect definitions on billions.
- eyko 6y agoIn spanish (at least in es-ES), billion is a million million, which is really annoying when you see clear translation errors. Often, a reporter will read a billion here or there in an english source, and leave it as is, bringing an order of magnitud error into the translated news article. This is especially annoying when that error makes its way into other opinion pieces comparing budgets in the billions and trillions where the author is completely oblivious to the fact that they're mistaken because of a translation error upstream.
- rbg246 6y agoThat is a massive problem especially when as you say when talking about political budgets.
- dehrmann 6y agoWhat's the point of the long scale? The numbers seem impractically large for anything other than science (which uses scientific notation, anyway). The only other time I've really seen "quadrillion" actually used is in with the Zimbabwe dollar.
- 6y ago
- stilley2 6y agoNot spelling, but my wife (Canadian) and I (American) recently had an interesting discussion about the placement of a comma following a quoted portion of a sentence. Americans are commonly taught the comma /always/ goes before the closing quotation marks, whereas in British English it depends on the context. You know it's a good weekend discussion when the Chicago Manual of Style gets involved.
- rbg246 6y agoThis is suitably obscure. Do you mean inverted commas or a comma?
- Zach_the_Lizard 6y agoI think it's something along the lines of: "Hacker News is," he said, "a website." (American) vs. "Hacker News is", he said, "a website". (British) We Americans are taught to always put punctuation inside the quotation marks, with a few limited exceptions. I gather our cousins across the sea are taught not to do this. It's started to bleed into my own writing given the international nature of the teams I work with.
- clairity 6y agoas an american, i never liked the inside rule, although it does "look right" to me from being taught it all through school. the comma is not part of the quote, so it shouldn't be inside, typographical systems be damned. i tend to put it outside, to the horror of (american) grammar snobs everywhere. i think programming is what got me to seriously reconsider the placement.
- stilley2 6y agoYeah basically. I'm still not entirely clear what the British rules are.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoGenerally, whatever the rulers say.
- stevekemp 6y agoWhy worry about spelling when you can argue about whether two-spaces after a period is better than one?
- scbrg 6y agoThat discussion becomes especially worthwhile when the text you're arguing about gets wrapped in HTML :-)
- ferzul 6y agotire vs tyre - apparently “tire” is older, but when pneumatic tyres became a thing, the spelling “tyre” caught on in England. So that's not an option. kerb vs curb (n) - again, curb is older, but somehow a spelling error^W varient caught on in England. In this case, it is unfortunate since Scottish people allegedly pronounce “curb” but write “kerb” (they pronounce ur like u+r and er like e+r, not as a single sound). So this one is not just not an option, it's actively hostile to many British peoplee -or vs -our: unless you will spell governour and use other like spellings, you have no historical leg to stand on so you might as well allow both variants. program is the older spelling, programme is preferred by those who are jealous of the French. I never understood the logic of swapping -re to -er in theatre, centre tho. I mean, why only -re but not -le? why don't Americans tickel and cuddel? Surely the logic is the same. So I think you can mount your high horse here.