I’m an American, and I spell things the American way (ie, honor not honour) but I spell them out! I hate it when people type in “AOLish”. ARGH! It makes you look completely illiterate! “hi who are u? having a good nite?” STOP IT! If you ever IM or ICQ with me, you can see that I use correct grammar and spelling about 97% of the time (I’m not completely immune to typos).
Anyway, I agree with the OP, it’s wrong and looks hideous, but I don’t know that it’s the fault of the US in general.
~Harborina
“This is my sandbox. I’m not allowed to go in the deep end. That’s where I saw the leprechauns.”
The British do this too: “ansaphone” for example, as well as the countless number of things called “Supa ____” … but for some reason when they do it, everyone thinks it’s quaint instead of lazy. Go figure.
I’m no language expert, so I have no idea how this change in spelling occurred. I remember the first time I saw “gaol,” spelled that way, though. It was a bit of a surprise, and my first thought was “Gay-ole? What’s that?” One more second for the functioning brain cells in my head to wake up, and I figured it out. Just had to sound it out. Have to appreciate those phonics classes I had waaaaaaaaaay back when.
Changing my sig, because Wally said to, and I really like Wally, and I’ll do anything he says, anytime he says to.
Everyone does it, and this thread appears to be making two arguments out of one OP.
The spelling cursed in the OP forms trade names, so “Lite Beer” should no more correspond to a “light beer” than a Ford should only be driven across shallow rivers - it’s just a name.
The other issue is that many people everywhere - Americans, Canadians and even Brits - seem to have devalued the merits of spelling. I think the color / colour / what is the Great Vowel Shift thing has been done to death in other threads. The real problem, in my view at least, is when people - even Dopers - who don’t think that the way they present their views is important enough to make them bother about such trivialities as speling.
Geesh, as a Canadian, I’d think you’d prefer shortening all the words. Compare that to the french, which has a rule to just keep adding vowels: Fontainebleu, coiffure, Bougainville, bouilabaisse.
The French version of Wheel of Fortune: you have to pay for vowels; consonants are free.
Oh please, get over it already. One of the reasons we have standardized spelling is because of things like dictionaries and people like prescriptivists. Be glad people dont spell things like they please (as they often did during the times of Old English and Middle English).
Anyway, I have never seen any of those spellings used by people in formal writings (term papers, essays for classes, etc). They are almost exclusively used by chatters online, and advertisers. If something silly like a different spelling for “light” or “thru” gets you upset, I’d hate to see how you are when something important comes up. Oh and if Canadians are taking these spellings in, then I wonder,which side is stupider (joke, people!).
Oh and snark, “phat” comes from “emphatic” so i’ve heard.
I found a clever one. There’s this play called W;t. (It’s pronounced “wit”)
Right now, it’s starring Judith Light (or is it lite ), of Who’s the Boss? fame.
I may be wrong about this, but I recall reading one time that the “lite” spelling came about when some company wanted to advertise their product as being lower in calories but, for some reason, it didn’t meet the criteria set forth by the FDA to qualify as “light”. Perhaps Cecil covered this?
“I should not take bribes and Minister Bal Bahadur KC should not do so either. But if clerks take a bribe of Rs 50-60 after a hard day’s work, it is not an issue.” ----Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Current Prime Minister of Nepal
Well, I kinda think that English could use a shaking up in the spelling department. In my extensive studies of foreign languages (O.K., so it was two years of C+'s in high school Spanish) the one think I liked about that language is that roughly, words are spelled the way they sound. (Don’t ask me how it works in French. I firmly believe they just throw silent letters in at random.)
That’s difficult to say for English with its anagram of spelling rules and exceptions (and if I can remember this statistic, the language has forty sounds attached to twenty-six letters).
However, English is stubborner than most. (People will still crucify you for splitting infinitives and ending questions with prepositions.)
Just for the record, it should be pointed out that utilizing an intentional misspelling to construct a trademarkable brand name is a standard practice. In other words, I could not form a company to make paper place mats, and trademark the term “place mat.” But I could call them “Playce Matts” and have that name trademarked to me.
Cecil dealt with this silliness in one of his columns, which a member of the trusty Column Ferret Squad will no doubt locate and post a link to.
Shortening words in English for convenience has been around for a long time, including back in the 1700s, when handwriting was such a chore. Jas for James, Wm for William, thru for through, & for and, natl for national…
I have one tip for you: if you think English is weird with spelling and grammar rules and the exceptions to them, for Gods sake NEVER try to learn Dutch
Yeah, and if you want to learn a language with an extremely simple grammatical structure and an amazingly sensible and aesthetically pleasing root system, learn Hebrew. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
(Coming from English, Hebrew is an evil, vicious language. All those extra vowels in French? They’re filched from Hebrew. I’m practically illiterate cause the language has no VOWELS! And it took me two years to figure out the difference between a feh sofit and a tzadee sofit!
Okay, I’m done now.)
~Harborina
“This is my sandbox. I’m not allowed to go in the deep end. That’s where I saw the leprechauns.”
I think you have moved the subject on from spelling, and into the realms of carelesness and misunderstanding.
*the one think I liked *
*English with its anagram of spelling rules * English with it’s amalgam of spelling?
Granted, the rules regarding the correct usage of its or it’s are developing through time and common usage - it is a living language after all.
I know that some consider it needlessly picky to insist on ‘correct’ language, but in a written forum, words are all that we have to communicate our great ideas. In particular, of course, when the thread is discussing the very form of language.
Oh yes, one of the great middle eastern scripts that decided “why use vowels, lets just make it hard on everyone else!” (well really, it’s descended from a consonantal script, like Arabic and a few others :)). At least Arabic shows the short vowels regularly, but not the long ones (not too sure about Hebrew).
Another difficult script is the old Tagalog syllabary (extinct, thank goodnes (joke)). It’s so inefficient it couldn’t even show consonants without the inherent vowel. When a consonant final syllable was used, the final consonant was not written (‘ak’ would be written as ‘a’) and through some means (unknown) added on when read later.
I’ve also heard that Tibetan spelling is horrendous as well.
It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…
(joke, people!).
), of Who’s the Boss? fame.
