Seeing as how the person who stated the OP hasn’t made a comment in many days now, I’m just gonna blatantly hijack this thread.
Pennylane I picked my screen-name several years ago when I was slightly more cynical and much likely to feel irritated by minor things. My first time in the online community occurred at the end of a day during which I had many people come up to me with what I thought were stupid and irrational problems. I concluded that everyone around me was insane and that I was a pillar of mental stability, and facetiously commented that was why people were coming to me with their problems. I felt like an insane asylum, a place a person goes when they can’t handle real problems, and therefore when I was first prompted for a screen-name Asylum is what my fingers typed. Since then I have come to question my assumptions that everyone is insane and that I am mentally stable, but I have grown attached to my screen-name and have decided to keep it.
Oh, how silly of me to forget that my ancestors came to America to become more British. Really, if you’ve ever heard of a little thing called The Bill of Rights, you shouldn’t be surprised. I seem to recall some trifling little bit about FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Of course, I could be thinking of something else entirely.
And please do pardon me if I happen to use slang once in a while. It could be because I don’t know any big words. That happens sometimes when you have the highest ACT score in your entire high school. That 35 in reading must have been from context clues.
Well, irregardless of all dose tings, the truth is that wrong American is much more funner than Proper English. Why you think I be wantin’ ta be as borin’ as all da rest of da people?
Then, of course, I’m just an American, and a Cajun at that. What can you expect? Should I be a paragon of proper pronunciation? I don’t think so. I can spell most words correctly(the American idea of correct)without the aid of spell check or a dictionary, and with that I must be content.
While we are at it, why do Americans insist on putting the punctuation marks inside the quotation marks rather than following the logical pattern of placing them on the outside?
(Actually, I already know the answer to that one – but I wish people would think about before checking the link below)
Well, I used to disagree with the idea that sloppy English causes sloppy thinking, but I think Kathleen may have just changed my name. Hell, sh can’t even put a decent argument together!!
Sadly the troll seems to have won after all. This thread used to be interesting but seems to have turned into a transatlantic slanging match. What a shame :(.
I don’t want to pick on Kathleen particularly. Maybe there was a smiley missing from bagkitty’s post too? Or maybe I’m overreacting? I’ve been suspicious of the OP’s motivation for this thread (still no sign of him returning I see) and although there has been a slight tendency for people to post stuff like “you’re wrong” “no you are” “well, we were first” etc., generally people have been expressing opinions about how much we should let academia control the natural thing that language is, and the contrast between formal and colloqial usage that I found pretty interesting. If I am overreacting feel free to take take no notice, otherwise play nice kids.
Sorry, bmerton, you are “beaeting a deade horse”. McDonald’s bought most of the English language last year, and is cutting it up into little pieces to make into toys for Happy Meals.
The Richard the Lionheart figure says “Woe, cursed Hamburglar!” till the battery goes dead.
Want some French fries? - MC
I even had a dream about pulykamell the other night. And then as I was drifting into consciousness I got confused and called him woollycamel instead by mistake.
I have more of a problem with the misnomer of “British English” than I do with any “dulling down” of the language. I can’t help feeling it’s one step away from saying that those people in England speak “English English” which is plainly ridiculous. The people in England speak English; as a nation we don’t need a dialect qualifier because it is the place where the language was created. The argument that we refer to it as British English because more than one country speaks it does not hold water either because French is spoken in hundreds of countries and not once have I ever heard the term “French French”.
I also don’t like the phrase “International English” to mean American Dialect English either. It’s a misnomer because International English isn’t; the broad majority of those outside the US/UK speaking a curious bastardisation of Standard (British) English and American Standard English; most europeans preferring the former due to what is deemed the illogical use of the “z” to replace the “s” (which is far more european); e.g. realize rather than realise. Except notably in Australia who have their own version of English quite removed from both English and American Dialect English.
I do find Aluminum annoying if only because of America’s curious insistence on it. It sounds quite atrocious in delivery and this pronunciation seems limited entirely to America. I dislike “color” for far more practical reasons. My teachers taught me to pur a “u” in (colour); and then I started programming - and all programming languages (even those created outside America) pay lip service to the convention of using the shorter American form - meaning I can spend a good amount of time “debugging” by removing my erronous “u”'s.
Finally the thing that erks me most about this whole thing, as an English man, is the American waiter with a pronounced Southern American accent complaining thusly about my pronunciation when ordering at a restaurant:
“Why ain’t (sic) ya (sic) speaking English?”
And later: “Can she order for ya (sic)? She don’t speak her English all wrong, man (sic)?”
There are times when you mentally commit murder; at that time I was choking him to death with his own tie.
Oh; and if one more American “corrects” my spelling to what is to them correct from what is to me and my countrymen correct I will have some very sharp words for them indeed.
American Dialect English has become through natural evolution a very different language from English; and the English should understand and respect that and not see fit to correct what is grammatically correct in American Dialect English. Similarly American’s should understand that Standard English is ALSO correct; and they should not say it is “wrong” or seek to imply that it’s not English.
There is no reason this needs to be an issue unless some inconsiderate person decides it needs to be - after all the two languages hardly ever cause mutual incomprehension except when slang is employed.
No offence, Woolfy, but your post would have carried more weight if it hadn’t contained so many spelling and grammatical errors (typos I can forgive).
I sympathise with your annoyance with the waiter, but the problem there seems more to do with his rudeness than with him being American – I’ll bet they have to put up with a similar attitude from waiters over here.
I also agree with the sentiments in your penultimate paragraph, though. Let’s live and let live eh?
