By your argument a car is not supported by it’s rubber wheels, but by the rubber wheels bouncing along a rough road.
A hovercraft’s proper name is “Air Cushioned Vehicle”, because that is what hold it up. It may indeed bounce over a rough surface, but that isn’t it’s mode of support.
I hope you “helped” her in writing a paper about how sometimes authority needs to be questioned when authority is plainly wrong.
It’s not culture. It is lazy. You simply fail to pronounce the “s” sound completely and you end up with “axe”. It should not be commonly used in a professional setting such as a classroom, unless it is being covered under a scheduled lesson plan of English dialects, from AAVE to The King’s English.
And your mode of speaking sounds utterly barbarous and uncouth to people who speak a different dialect, as it would to someone from your own region a couple centuries ago, or a couple centuries from now. It is indeed culture, and calling another culture ‘lazy’ is how we get into all of those massive problems that scarred so much of the last century.
I think there’s an argument in certain specific circumstances for changing vocabulary in books when crossing the Atlantic. If the reader is misled or is thrown out of the writing by a Wtf? moment, then the author’s intention is surely being done a disservice, with something quite inconsequential doing harm to the text.
To give a non-literary example, I encountered a “pavement narrows” roadsign somewhere or other in North America. While the sign meant that the roadway narrowed (and the sidewalk widened), in British English the meaning would be the exact opposite (the sidewalk narrowed, and perhaps the roadway widened). Not really a problem for a roadsign qua roadsign; but if used descriptively in a book, inadvertent confusion would be caused.
A more obvious example would be changing AmE “pants” to BrE “trousers”, something that might be necessary in some contexts to avoid a non-comedic scene being rendered comedic.
(Now if only the BBC would stop referring to Ireland’s “MPs”, and would stop treating the words “Parliament” and “Dáil” as coterminous… :rolleyes:)
I don’t get your point here. You’ve just agreed with what I said.
I made no claim as to what supports the Hovercaft. We both know it is the air cushion.
The spray coming from the vessel can, depending on weather conditions, be a combination of outwash from the air-cushion and skirt contact with the waves.
Hence why I said she wasn’t totally wrong.
I think one could make the same exact argument that authors should avoid using high level vocabulary words in children’s literature, period. I know I was probably confused the first time I read “eloquent” or “hindrance”, and those are perfectly cromulent American English words. Is there a moment of confusion? Perhaps. But using context, a dictionary, or perhaps an international message board full of helpful people, the reader can become educated, and avoid that particular confusion in the future.
And better to have a moment’s confusion and then clarity when reading a children’s book as a child than to utterly embarrass yourself in front of a classroom or school board or while traveling when you’ve grown to be an adult and are confused then, with real world consequences.
(And, for what it’s worth, I’ve only seen “pavement narrows” to mean the sidewalk is getting narrower, too. If it’s the road narrowing, there’s usually just a pictoral sign, like this. I know that one example wasn’t the crux of your argument, but I would have been just as confused as you in that instance.)
I certainly accept the general thrust of what you’re saying, and indeed I generally accept what was said in the post to which I was replying.
However, the problem as I see it isn’t that of encountering “new” words; as you say, that’s what children (and also, of course, adults) should be doing when reading. What’s tricky are “false friends”; those cases where the reader doesn’t realise that the words they’re reading mean something different from their actual intent.
An American writer using the word “faucet” is merely using an unfamiliar word to most British readers. I could see arguments either way for this being left unchanged, or for it being altered to “tap”. But words such as “corn”, “pants”, “solicitor”, “pavement”, “thongs”, “biscuit”, “robot”, and “cookie” have different default meanings in various parts of the English-speaking world, and it may not be at all apparent to the reader that the meaning of a sentence as they understood it was not in fact the correct meaning.
I’m not suggesting that such words should always be changed; merely that I think there is good reason in specific circumstances for them to be changed.
Terms of art can also present particular problems; cf. the term “constitutional convention” for an especially good example.
I didn’t call a culture lazy. I called a widespread mispronunciation of a common simple word lazy. I’ve heard it mispronounced by someone from just about every race I’ve encountered. I’ve even heard my voice starting to head down that path and consciously worked to say it correctly.
Soda, pop, cola are all part of a culture, either location based or community based. Each has a specific etymology. “axe” is just a malformed sound.
I see the problem. You are apparently assuming she was meaning “bounce” like you are defining it. That is not the case. Said said it moved by bouncing. In her mind the hovercraft was just a large multi person version of this. Minus the frog cozy.
She didn’t say “The waves jostled us.” or “The sea was so rough the spray from the wave tops arced over the top of the windows in the passenger cabin.” She said it bounced.
Elaboration? Are you saying a line can’t be tangent to a parabola? Because, well, it can. There are thousands of examples I can find online where math problems are posted to solve for the equation of a line tangent to a parabola at a certain point.
Or are you taking issue with the word ‘cross’ in my post? If so, yes, the tangent line doesn’t technically cross the parabola, as parabolas don’t have an inflecton point. She would have been correct in pointing out that a tangent line doesn’t cross a parabola. The thing is…she told me flat out “A line can not be tangent to a parabola,” which is patently false.
However, there are plenty of lines that do cross a parabola only once (for instance, one that bisects it…and while this will have an undefined slope if it’s vertical, it is fine for any other orientation of a parabola.)
Genuinely interested - In what parts of the world does “Robot” have a different meaning? (I’m assuming some people think robot means an android and others think it means an electronic motive machine, but I’d never have guessed that it was a regional difference).
What an interesting viewpoint. Given that ask derives from the anglo-saxon acsain a case could be made that those who say axe are defaulting to an older more original pronunciation and those of us who say ask are the ones who are malforming sounds. I wouldn’t because there’s no real way to rank phonemes and morphemes on any sort of appropriateness scale. There’s merely what a culture judges as standard and what it says is not. If everyone else but you starts saying axe instead of ask, who’s wrong?
There are an infinite amount of lines tangent to a parabola. However, only one at each point. You claimed that a line touching the vertex is automatically tangent. That’s not true. Take y=x^2: only the horizontal is tangent, and only the horizontal and vertical lines cross at one point.
I had a psych prof who strove to convince the class that a hangover was purely psychosomatic. Caused by guilt, he said…when we had a hangover we were punishing ourselves for the previous night’s debauchery. Learn to drink without guilt, he said, and we’d never get hungover again.
As a veteran of a good many guilt-free but still debilitating hangovers, I begged to differ with him.
SS
I have to ask, what were you going to look up in the “A” volume pertaining to hovercraft?
Also, I’m not exactly sure what problem you had with the notion of a hovercraft bouncing across the Channel. While they may offer a smoother ride than a similar sized boat traveling at the same speed, hovercraft don’t magically glide across heavy seas. As the bow skirt impacts waves at high speeds, I imagine it would throw up a lot of spray. I assume she meant “bounced across the Channel,” as in it was a bouncy ride in high seas? Or was she actually saying that it took off, hit the sea with such force that it flew upwards, then came crashing down on the other side?
Ooops, I just caught your earlier exchange with Novelty, which answers my second question. It seems she DID think it physically bounced across the Channel, like a rubber ball bouncing down the street!
There was a podcast I used to listen to, I think called A Way With Words, that asked this question once. It turns out that, iirc, in South Africa, ‘robots’ refers to traffic lights.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect American students to read British Lit. with British spellings, but I would expect someone who accepted a job in another country to know something about what she was getting into, or at the very least to be willing to learn when she got there, to see the possibility that there might be a difference from what she had learned at home.
As Ace309 said, it means a traffic light in South Africa.
The issue of whose “fault” it is is not relevant. As you’ve just demonstrated, we can’t all know the ins and outs of each and every variety of English. And as I pointed out before, it’s those very words and phrases that we think we know the meaning of that can potentially interfere with the reading.
I’m sure most authors would be happy with the occasional change of word being made when republished in a given territory, if it meant that the person reading their work in that territory experienced the author’s intent, rather than their exact original choice of word. Obviously this is not something that should be done on a simple search-and-replace basis.
Here’s another real-life example of unintended confusion caused by differences in vocabulary:
After spending a couple of years abroad, I moved back to the UK. I’d picked up a number of Australianisms and Americanisms. A little while after starting at a new job, I made reference in conversation to the fact that shirts with tails seem to pull out of the back of your pants all the time (in contrast with shirts cut to a uniform length along the bottom edge). There then followed a confusing few minutes while I and the others talked at cross-purposes; my (female) boss in particular couldn’t believe that I tucked my shirt into what she understood to be my underpants. (The expression on her face was priceless!)
If you’re an American author dealing with a serious subject, and make some sort of reference to a character’s “pants”, do you really want British readers to be reading something funny (or bizarre)? Or would you in fact prefer that the word be changed to “trousers”, so that the original tone was maintained and the reader was kept in the world you’d intended?
I’m not saying that these changes should be made; simply that there is a rational and sensible basis for making them in certain cases.
My fourth or fifth grade teacher (I can’t remember for sure–it was a long time ago) thought that “smokeless tobacco” was some sort of cigarette that didn’t produce smoke.
My ninth grade geography teacher who insisted that there was no such country as Belize. This was in 1985, so only four years after independence, so you’d think that a person who made a living teaching western civilization and geography might’ve made note of a country that gained independence (from the UK no less) and changed its name, especially a country on her own continent. But no such luck. Even after I said that it had recently become independent (I wasn’t sure exactly when) and had formerly been called British Honduras, she didn’t relent in her belief that I was entirely incorrect.
Making things worse was the fact that the pull-down map in the classroom was from 1967. There were quite a few things that were no longer accurate on that map. I ended up having to photocopy pages from a fortunately up to date encyclopedia in the library (at my own cost) to prove to her that the country existed.
Later that term, this same teacher took two points off of an otherwise perfect paper because she believed that I had just made up the words “aegis” and “unfettered.”
Did I mention that this woman had been teaching for more than 30 years? And apparently owned neither an up to date atlas nor dictionary? Yeah.