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Developer & Designer, News Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 12,959
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English Is Just Plain Ol' Weird!
It's the weekend - time for some off-topic confusion about the English language! The readers (and staff) of Pocket PC Thoughts are quite diverse. There are people in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the list goes on and on. Yet for the majority of us, there's one common point - we all speak English. Funnily enough, as common as that point is, there's an ironic uncommonness to it. Subdivide our English language into different parts and you'll have some of us speaking American English, some of us speaking British English, some of us speaking Australian English, some of us speaking L337 3N9L15H and the insanity continues.
The other day, I had one of the readers get a little irked over the fact that I used a plural verb after what American English would see as a singular noun. "Handango have a trial version available..." as opposed to "Handango has a trial version available...". Despite getting blasted for being grammatically incompetent, I couldn't help but laugh that this was around the fifteenth time in as many months that the same thing had been pointed out to me. Yet in British/Australian English, treating business names as group nouns is almost second nature, hence the copious use of subsequent plural verbs. So no, I'm not grammatically incompetent (or at least I hope not), but all this uproar has been generated because there just isn't any uniformity in our modern-day English language.
But the differences don't stop there. Just yesterday, one of the Pocket PC Thoughts readers jokingly exclaimed how annoying it was for us Commonwealth chums to be spelling "colour" with a "u". Thankfully, he/she had not spoken about our use of "s" instead of "z" in words like "customise", "realise", etc. But I raised that point anyway! :mrgreen:
Then I had an interesting conversation with Dave (a.k.a. Paragon) the other day. He knew Australian slang! And there's no denying that slang helps make every English language unique. I've lost count the number of times I've confused the other editors on IM with my Australian slang (which at the time, I forgot was slang altogether). Earlier in the week, I was convinced that Ed and I spoke two different languages. Ed, with his thick Southern American accent, and me, with my "true-blue" Aussie tongue, didn't seem to integrate nicely. But that's another story... Let's just say our conversation was filled with "huh?" more than anything else.
So what's the point of this thread? Let's use it to highlight differences in our English language. Got something in American English that British English doesn't have? Vice versa? What about a bit of slang to wind down the day? Heck, if you want to talk about the annoyance of the lack of uniformity in our metric and imperial systems as well, you're more than welcome to. Hopefully, with enough people providing input, we can finally work out just how weird the English language is, and the next time I (apparently) do something grammatically incorrect in my front page posts, well, you'll know it's not that grammatically incorrect after all. "Bonzer! Get crackin' on them posts!" ;-)
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