Channel Ten are heavily promoting their latest “New” (read: Aussie version of a Foreign TV show) show, Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?, fittingly hosted by Rove McManus.
The thing is, Australian schools don’t use “Grades” to refer to school levels- they use Years (as in “Year 5” or “Year 12”). So why didn’t they rename the show? Are you smarter than a Year 5er? would work just as well and be understood by almost everyone, without resorting to needless Americanisation.
Oh, and before anyone tries to ask why I hate America/Freedom: I hate Freedom because it means other people can disagree with me. I don’t hate America, I just don’t like seeing our own linguistic identity being swamped as a result of people too lazy to change the default language on their copy of MS Word. :mad:
Granted, but one of the two States using the “Grade” system is Tasmania, which doesn’t count (they eventually switch to “Years” for High School), and every other mainland state except SA uses the “Year” system. Given the comparatively small TV Viewer market in SA compared to every other State of Australia, I’m still trying to work out why they didn’t think it might be a good idea to rename the show for the Australian market…
I wonder if they’d call the NZ Version Are you smarter than a Standard 4 student?
It was an attempt at humour, to ward off the tongue in cheek “Why do you hate Freedom/America/Kittens/Puppies???” type questions these things invariably generate.
They recently changed the grade level naming system in NZ to “Years”, matching Australia, though I have no idea which AU State’s nomenclature they’re following.
Please tell me that upon seeing the title of this thread alone, I wasn’t the only one who immediately thought of ABC’s infinitely stupidly named new series, Dirty Sexy Money.