The British also assign plurality to collective nouns: The corporation are planning to introduce a new product. Combine this with the penchant to make a singular subject (math) into a plural form (maths), and you might get something like this: “Maths is the subject this class are studying.”
Take that, all grammar nazis with your noun/verb agreement.
Maybe in Argentinian, you overseas weirdos… in Spain it’s only inflamable.
La palablra flamable no está en el diccionario.
In the UK, one quite often hears the negative form of the word, “dis-chuffed” = not happy or pleased. I don’t exactly abominate “dis-chuffed”, but don’t greatly like it.
A fair few of us, I gather, have a slight problem with the biblical “The wages of sin is death” – that is in fact grammatically justified, it can just give one a 
moment.
No you are right, I was sure “flamable” was a word, but it isn’t (not even in Argentina where we have the newest and bestest worlds).
Still, it should be.
I sure don’t think of “mathematics” as plural, any more than “physics” or “ethics” or “economics” (which I’ve never heard abbreviated “econs”).
If it’s plural, what, pray tell, is one mathematic?
Y’all, we say “math” because we’re abbreviating “math[ematics]”. The S gets cut off along with all the other letters after the H.
Well – physics, ethics, and economics are, in my experience, not abbreviated at all – so I reckon that that particular thing, is moot. As per my OP: these issues are really not subject to logic or common sense – it’s a matter of feelings. Americans just feel “maths”, to be idiotic and ludicrous; Brits feel the same way about “math”; and in all probability, “evermore shall be so”.
What about those non-sentences that are all over the web these days? They really infuriate me for probably irrational reasons.
“That moment when the songs you listened to in high school are getting played on the oldies station.” “That time such and such happened.” “When your dog does _____.”
Just add “remember when” or “doesn’t it suck” or “Does ____ ever happen to you?” It isn’t that hard to write in complete sentences, folks. Most of us learned how by the third grade.
With this thread being basically about irrational dislikes-and-likes: I’ll just say that I’m seemingly one of a very small minority, in that I HATE the bloody word “cromulent”, sometimes to the point of screaming fury. And I’d have difficulty explaining why. I know the story of its origin – I don’t loathe The Simpsons, though I have trouble seeing why this cartoon is adored to the point that it is. I don’t feel that there was a significant gap in the English language, which “cromulent” perfectly filled. I really don’t know why – but if there were one word in the English language which I could nuke from outer space and obliterate for evermore, it would be this one.
What do you have against embiggening the vocabulary?
Stat is what is studied at Yale, at least.
I’ve never hear a “real American” ™ refer to a university or college as either “varsity” or “uni”. The latter is never used. The former when used would refer to the the top team of athletes. The second ranked team would be junior varsity or jv.
And college and university mean something different in the U.S. A university as a group of schools, the School of Medicine, the Law School, the Graduate School, etc. The undergraduate portion is the college. So Harvard College is a part of Harvard University.
The way the word “college” is used in the United States is ambiguous. It can mean a constituent school of a university, but it can also be a free-standing institution, particularly a 2-year school, or a small 4-year school that focuses on liberal arts or a narrow area of specialization. But, counterintuitively, it is often used as a generic term for all institutions of tertiary education, including universities. And for historical reasons, some institutions are called “colleges” even though they meet the legal definition of a university. (Boston College is one example.)
Yes some institutions that started as colleges have retained that as a name even when they’ve added schools which would nominally make them a university. In the case of Boston College. There already is a Boston University which is well known.
I know a lot of you in the midwest and Canada say this, but my future living situation is predicated on not living somewhere where I have to baby talk and order “pop.”
We’ll start calling it aluminium when you start calling it platinium.
Yes, in Britain, Dr. Nick is known as Dr Nick.
Monty Python, “Matching Tie and Handkerchief,” 1973 – “The record’s stuck, the record’s stuck, the record’s stuck, the…”
It vaguely bothers me that Brits call dead batteries flat, as if they were tires. Er, tyres.
I recently learned that “to waffle”, which means to be undecided about something in the US, means to blather on about something to Brits. Doesn’t really bother me, but is a bit odd.
“Britist Left Waffles on Falkland Islands” is therefore triply ambiguous.
Actually some of youse are pretty old, such as using vos for the 2nd singular (I assume that l sneaked in - either that or you’ve been rereading Borges lately). I find it interesting how, since each dialect has kept somewhat different things and changed somewhat different things, we all have features others find archaic and features others consider shocking attacks on propriety.
In my part of The UK “veggie” is only used as a slightly derogatory term for vegatarians, whereas “veg” is a contraction of “vegetable”.