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- "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my nov
by perihelions 3y ago
- "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment."
- "None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler..."
- "F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught."
- "Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me."
https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ ("American Gods Blog, Post 24" [2001])
- daveslash 3y agoRe>> "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Ah, the Scunthorpe problem. [0] It's never a good idea, but the immature 12 y/o in my always giggles at the examples. One of my favorites is the word "ass" being replaced by "butt", resulting in this gem [1]... "'Prohibition on buttbuttination' states, 'No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political buttbuttination.'" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#cite_note-butt-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#cite_note-b... [1]
- nunuvit 3y ago> In February 2004 in Scotland, Craig Cockburn reported that he was unable to use his surname ... In 2010, he had a similar problem registering on the BBC website So the BBC was allowed to register their domain without issue, but Craig couldn't register his account with the BBC. That's Dick.
- hunter2_ 3y agoSome of those could be avoided by using a search regex such as "\bblonde\b". I believe a sophisticated enough regex could solve all of these, if it were a central library used and maintained by many.
- jwestbury 3y agoTroublingly, "blonde" isn't even a British vs. American English thing -- it's a gendered descriptor, of which we have relatively few remaining in English. Blonde is the feminine form, blond is the masculine/neuter form. Whether you want to preserve gendered adjectives is a different question entirely, but the definitions are rather clear, having carried over from French.
- ChrisRR 3y agoYou must be american if you think it's that easy. I think american don't realise how brits end up learning both our versions of words and theirs too because so much TV is american.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoMaybe people can just deal with books having regional differences in the same way authors do. Is it so scary for F. Scott Fitzgerald to write about the color of the light, but Rowling to talk about the colours of the school houses?
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoAs someone who reads fantasy fiction a lot, honestly I'd prefer if I read everything in American English. The biggest thing that gets me is e.g. "defence" instead of "defense" and other places where British English uses a 'c' instead of an 's'. It seriously diminishes the immersion for me, even if I've read probably 50+ books with the version I'm not used to by now. It's never stopped me from reading a book before, but it does diminish my enjoyment quite a bit. For nonfiction, I don't care, I'm reading actively regardless. But when reading passively for enjoyment, it's noticeable and irritating.
- dusted 3y agoI once worked on a project where we had the concept of a "case" and we had to change it to a "task".. Suddenly, we had a lot of "switch/task" statements that somewhat perplexed the compiler.
- ben_w 3y agoMy dad had a work anecdote about a company invite to an "African-American tie event". It was a British company.
- ChrisRR 3y agoThe Scunthorpe problem In my experience Americans are shocked that it's perfectly fine to say that someone's black in the UK.
- AceyMan 3y agoThose of us who follow usage guidelines more closely know that it's OK to use the 'b-word'. Case in point, https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-us-news-business-ap-top-news-racial-injustice-71386b46dbff8190e71493a763e8f45a https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-us-news-busine...
- OJFord 3y agoOh God I hope people showed up in some outrageously... I don't even know what, but just some outrageous (not black bow) ties. That's brilliant.
- actionfromafar 3y agoI could see how some ties could upset everyone.
- viraptor 3y agoAlternatively, that's how you end up with an accidental cakewalk.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoMy South African sister in-law who recently immigrated to America said that her black peers in grade school would sometimes refer to themselves as African American. Cultural hegemony complete.
- 3y ago
- blowski 3y agoAn SEO bot stole my blog post about Old Street in London, it was now about Ancient Road instead.
- smilespray 3y agoYou should check out the TV show Old Aliens.
- wiml 3y agoDon't you mean Senior Citizen Foreigners?
- qingcharles 3y agoThis was great, thank you. One positive outcome though is the invention of a collection of excellent words: foreverything, foreveryone and forevery. I don't know what they mean, but I like them.