I have been over in the states a long time now - 13-14 years. I get mad at my English friends when they come out with the typical crap complaining when I spell in an American fashion now. But there are still some words that just grate on me when I hear them pronounced in an American fashion.
The chief of these are Iraq and Iran. I have never heard anyone call the country Eye-ndia or Eye-srael. Also the inability of any American I have yet met to correctly say Edinburgh.
As for words themselves, I can never, despite having raised a child here, find the word ‘diaper’ anything but plain wrong.
Eye-rack and eye-ran also drive this American-born (I was going to say native American but that’s a whole nother can of worms) nuts. Sarah Palin does it and that drives me double nuts. A CNN correspondent (I can’t remember her name now) did an ad for CNN where she is talking to a guy that says eye-rack and corrects him like a schoolteacher.
BTW it also drives me nuts that Brits say Nick-a-rahg-you-ah.
First you Brits need to knock it off with this notional agreement crap. Singular nouns, even if they are collective, take singular verbs, and doing otherwise is an affront to all that is good in the world.
Seriously, that was the only difference that bothered me when I was living in the UK, but my god, for some reason it’s like nails down a chalkboard to me.
I think it’s more fundamentally because the “Eye-rack” and “Eye-ran” pronunciations are pretty much beaten into us by the present Administration, and the broadcast media as well; however, in the case of the latter I can’t recall for certain if it’s as widespread as it is in W.'s speeches (and W2’s).
Also you have to remember there’s that deep-seated fear of being perceived as pretentious. I tend to gravitate more towards the notion that you should at least try to pronounce a foreign place name or word as a native would. At the same time I have to admit that saying “pah-REE” for Paris or pronouncing Italian place names with a correct accent would be unbearably pretentious, like someone who insists on pronouncing ‘karate’ kah-rah-tay. So with less current foreign names, we have to make a decision every time.
I thought they pronounce ‘shed’ in the UK as…‘shed’. Seriously, on the TopGear Ground Force parody, which centered a lot around a shed, everyone pronounced it the same way us 'mericans do (except the poles, who said nothing). This is also how they pronounced it on that bastion of early '90s Middle Class life, ‘Keeping Up Appearences’ (which had a number of odd sounding to me pronouncations such as ‘gay-rage’ for garage).
A few years back, a Jaguar commerical aired on local (New York) TV where in the main body of the commercial (done for national distribution) the female voice pronounced it ‘Jag-u-wah’ several times, whereas the end section (giving the local distributorship’s address) opted for ‘Jag-war’
That one really pisses my colleagues off too - “England were crap against Andorra last night.”
It also gets me in trouble when I write motions - I will often use the plural verb form after a company name, without thinking about it. I then have to make sure I proof read carefully.
Well, Eye-rack and Eye-ran bug the heck out of me, too. And I don’t know anyone who uses either.
But this:
I don’t understand. Why is “diaper” wrong? Should we be saying “nappies” or something? Not an American word. You’d get Americans all eating Wetabix before you’d get the saying “nappies”.
I know the checkered history of “diaper”, and how our diapers aren’t “diapered”, but that’s part of the geologic history of the word, and fascinating by itself. There are plenty of words whose history shows that they’ve wandered far from their roots. It’s too late to do anything about them now.
it’s nothing against the US. I’m not being rational here. I have no issues with apartments, elevators, sidewalks etc. Diaper may indeed be a perfectly cromulent word, but it will always sound totally and utterly wrong to me.
