Really? I would agree with “gaol”, but as others have said “programme” in the UK tends to still be used in non-computing uses.
I’m Australian and I would say that both “gaol” and “programme” are rarely used here these days. But “kerb” and more particularly “tyre” are absolutely used all the time. I have never seen “curb” (in the edge of the road sense - it is of course used in the “curb your enthusiasm” sense) or “tire” used except by someone who didn’t know better.
Are you saying that more and more people are using the adjective form “everyday” (“I love everyday people”) even when the situation calls for an adverbial phrase (“every day I write the book”)?
That reminds me: nowadays “dwarves” seems to have replaced “dwarfs” as the common plural for “dwarf,” thanks mainly to Tolkien.
That’s been my experience. Almost everyday [sic ;)] I’ll see things like a store advertising “Save Money Everyday!” :smack:
Both usages of “curb” are really the same sense–to limit, restrain, define a boundary for.
You don’t. You get “mike” from “microphone”. And mike has been around a lot longer than mic.
Essay on the subject by someone with more linguistic cred than I have: Mike, Dammit.
And likewise you get “fridge” from “refrigerator”. Every once in a while I see people write “frig” instead, which means something else altogether.
There’s a general trend in the U.S. toward dropping the hyphens from hyphenated words. E-mail becomes email. To-morrow becomes tomorrow (though not in my lifetime). There’s a book called One Word, Two Words, Hyphenated that just lists the ones that are often confused. If I recall correctly, the book is about 20 years old now, and it’s interesting how many of the hyphenated words in that book are now written almost exclusively without the hyphen.
Many computer terms have changed. As an example, when I wrote my first computer book in 1996, “an internet” (lowercase “i”) was a generic term for an interconnected set of networks, and “the Internet” (uppercase “i”) was the specific term for what ARPANET had become.
Diskette was consistently shortened to “disk” in the 1980s, but was frequently “disc” by the 90s.
As for “donut,” I didn’t think that was any more acceptable than “thru.” Those are words that you use in cute intentionally-misspelled signage or in text messages, not in real writing.
Drought hasn’t changed spelling in my lifetime, but I notice a lot of people in Montana and Wyoming still pronounce it “drowth” instead of “drowt.”
I’m not sure whether perq changed to perk or whether I’m simply misremembering how to shorten perquisite. I could have sworn it was spelled with a Q back in the 70s.
How old are you, Skald? When I took a course on how to run a sound board in the early 1980s, it was spelled “mic” everywhere in the studio. It always seemed like a much more logical spelling to me.
Surely it’s the other way around, diskette was coined from disk, with disk just being the American spelling of disc.
I’d always assumed as most references to HDs, floppies etc originated form the US, so disk became the de facto spelling, even though in other flavours of English disc would have been used.
Whereas CDs, being non-American in origin, used non-Amercian English, or even Dutch maybe.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:67, topic:652997”]
How old are you, Skald? When I took a course on how to run a sound board in the early 1980s, it was spelled “mic” everywhere in the studio. It always seemed like a much more logical spelling to me.
[/QUOTE]
I’ll be turning 44 this year (though, as Evil!Skald, I will naturally be stealing 15 minutes off all board members’ lives and adding them to my own to retard my aging). I never encountered the “mic” spelling for until the 2000s – except maybe as on audio equipment. Never in writing.
That’s interesting. I picked up the perception that “disk” refers to magnetic disks (e.g. floppy disks, hard disks, zip disks (do these even exist anymore?)) and that “disc” refers to optical discs (mostly CD’s, though it can include laserdiscs).
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:67, topic:652997”]
As for “donut,” I didn’t think that was any more acceptable than “thru.” Those are words that you use in cute intentionally-misspelled signage or in text messages, not in real writing.
[/QUOTE]
That’s not my experience. “Thru” is wrong in all formal situations, but “donut” is now a perfectly acceptable variant spelling.
To me, “mic” is the more logical abbreviation, although “mike” makes the pronunciation much clearer. I’m guessing the studio used “mic” because it’s one less letter to fit on the labels on all of the sliders, jacks, and boxes.
Oh, yeah? Well … get off my lawn! Damned kids and their “variant spellings.”
In recent years I have noticed that people are not corrected when they write “payed.” Has it always been acceptable and I’ve just been wrong all my years?
Both dictionary.com/Random House/Collins and Merriam-Webster say that “payed” is okay for nautical meanings (at least three very different ones), so unless the people are pirates… On the other hand, one of RH’s exceptions is to defintion 24c, which doesn’t exist.
How long has the execrable word “pant” existed, when used by clothing stores for the whole object? Are we going to see usages like “pass me that scissor” too?
Oh yeah - I hate *roofs *too.
It’s beyond my lifetime, but I’m charmed by the closing credits of the *Honeymooners *spelling the contraption I’m watching them on as T-V. I guess there wasn’t a standard spelling quite yet.
NM
As others have mentioned, I’ve always used “disk” for floppies and hard drives, and “disc” for CDs and DVDs.
Oddly, I prefer “grey”, but often stop myself from spelling it that way in favor of “gray”, since I’m American. Weird quirk of mine.
Yeah, the proper full name of the stuff is “Balogna sausage”, though the Wikipedia article does acknowledge the “baloney” spelling (and others).
I remember when it used to be “Raymond Luxury Yacht”. Now it is “Throat Warbler Mangrove”. This may be a British thing though.
I’m not particularly bothered by mike but you can be assured now that I know how irksome some find it, I will be using mic as often as possible.
Erm, Bologna … :smack: