Re: Ugh
Exactly.
26591 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Even Scientific American, back in the day, allowed spellings according to the Author's background. And even mixed & matched, in the case where one author was quoting another. (See Martin Gardner's columns on Conway's Game of Life, for example ... if you can find reprints that haven't been "helpfully" edited, that is).
Regardless of my somewhat irreverent amusement elsewhere in this thread, it may surprise some that I agree with the above post.
Well, most of the post ... Kate Fox's observation "The English are not usually given to patriotic boasting – indeed, both patriotism and boasting are regarded as unseemly, so the combination of these two sins is doubly distasteful. But there is one significant exception to this rule, and that is the patriotic pride we take in our sense of humour, particularly in our expert use of irony." is clearly bullshit.
Or perhaps she didn't notice the major kerfuffle caused by The Sex Pistols when they were top of the charts during the Queen's Silver Jubilee, as the entire nation lost its tiny collective mind in celebration ... There are other, somewhat less egregious examples.
... inherently plural , as it is short for "Mathematics". Presumably you say "Mathematicses"?
Kind of like RPM is the plural (the S is implied from "revolutions"). If you insist on saying "RPMs", I'll need to know how many minutes you are intending to measure those revolutions.
"ize" is the original, from the ancient Greek. You Brits partially changed over to the French "ise" awhile back. Kinda like you did when going metric.
So once again, you're speaking/spleling in French, not your vaunted English.
The Big Dic says that both -ise and -ize are correct in British English.
As a Left Coastian Yank, I have never heard of anybody having issues with any of those phrases.
However, willfully, intentionally and even stubbornly illiterate people exist in every society. Usually they are spread out among the general population, where they can't cause much trouble ... but I'm sure (nearly) all the readers of this august rag can name a few States where they seem to have concentrated for varying reasons. Were you, perchance, in one of those states?
And yes, "it was OK" tends to be a backhanded compliment around here.
As a Yank who spent many years in the British isles, I suspect your problem is that you just plain aren't as funny as you think you are. Cross-pond humo(u)r can be difficult to translate for the GreatUnwashed, but it's not impossible. And once explained (regardless of direction), it keeps its humo(u)r. Except many of the Brits refuse to have anything to do with the crossing from the West "because it's Yank".
There is a word for that ...
(AKA "Candidate for a Pullet Surprise")
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it's weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.
A checker is a bless sing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when eye rime.
Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed too bee a joule.
The checker pours o'er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule.
Bee fore a veiling checker's
Hour spelling mite decline,
And if we're lacks oar have a laps,
We wood bee maid too wine.
Butt now bee cause my spelling
Is checked with such grate flare,
Their are know fault's with in my cite,
Of nun eye am a wear.
Now spelling does knot phase me,
It does knot bring a tier.
My pay purrs awl due glad den
With wrapped word's fare as hear.
To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should bee proud,
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaw's are knot aloud.
Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays
Such soft wear four pea seas,
And why eye brake in two averse
Buy righting want too pleas.
-Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. Zar, early 1990s
"As I understand it, if someone want an international audience you should use UK English"
For the spoken word.
However, like it or not, just as written Arabic drove early science, written Latin (Koin Greek, Aramaic, et al) drove early Christianity, written Deutsch drove later science (etc., I won't continue. You are quite welcome), written American English is the lingua franca of tehintrawebtubes, and of the FOSS world. This isn't a good thing, nor is it a bad thing. All it is is an accident of history.
However, it will change over time. If there is one thing that's a dead cert, it's that language mutates. Much to the deep dismay of all those Internet King's English nazis out there.
And of course, running code trumps all.
Please understand Godwin's Law before invoking it, or I shall laugh at you.
"Just note it was before remote login"
No. We've been using remote login for well over half a century. In fact, the very first event across the (D)ARPANET was a login attempt. It failed, but the second attempt succeeded. You can read about it here. That was the 29th of October, 1969.
For those of you who don't like pointy-clicky and prefer copy-pasta, here ya go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Initial_four_hosts
We had a high-profile customer making a transition from their own internal world-wide network to a more commercial T-carrier based system. The company I worked for supplied the necessary gear to interface between $TELCO and their own equipment. This wasn't pre-Internet, but it was before the general use of the Internet for routing internal traffic around the world, so all their WAN links were supplied by one $TELCO or another. Call it mid 1980s.
Our customer service got a phone call from the customer allowing as to how one of their offices in Sydney, Australia refused to see the rest of the world. Customer service called me (the primary TAC Engineer for the customer), and I eyeballed it. Digging into the network, I could see that a loopback switch in the Sydney office was thrown, it would need to be flipped back to connect their LAN to their WAN. I informed customer service, and figured that was the end of it. Until about two hours later when my Boss wandered in and asked what I knew about Sydney being down. I blinked three or four times to reboot (kernel hacking again, probably) and told him I had located the cause and informed our guys as to the fix, and then got on with putting out fires elsewhere.
He replied that apparently the dude in charge of the Sydney office didn't like the answer, had called his Boss, who called his Boss, who called the director of the Australian branch, who called the owner of our company, who was informed by our CS guys that I was responsible, and so now my Boss had been put in charge of fixing it. He wasn't happy. So using my TAC access, I showed him the "fault". He expressed disbelief. And called the owner down to my office. The owner (the engineer who founded the company, and a real tech, not just a suit) also expressed disbelief. I believe his actual words were "What the fuck are those useless fucks doing?" ...
ANYway, he called the director of the Australian branch (just a suit, apparently), who got all shouty and demanded an immediate fix, now, or we'd lose the entire contract if he had anything to say about it. Our owner tried to calm him down, but the dude wasn't having any of it ... so to make a long(er) story short(er), he promised to "put his best man on it" ... and I got sent to Sydney on the next flight. Out of San Francisco. First Class. At very short notice. To flip a switch. With invoice in hand, to be presented personally to the Director in Oz. I honestly thought he was going to take a swing at me when he read it ... it was a tick over $20,000 ... in mid-1980s dollars. Broken down in glorious detail. To flip a switch.
But wait ... it gets better! When I was at the airport heading home (having been in Australia for maybe 2 hours total), I got called to the proverbial White Courtesy Phone[0]. Seems a different branch of the very same company had a similar problem, this time in a satellite office outside Boca Raton, Florida. I called my Boss and asked something like "WTF‽‽‽". He tiredly allowed as to how he personally had checked, and indeed it was the exact same issue. Our owner had asked if I wouldn't mind doing the hono(u)rs ... a completely different Director had called and threatened him in a similar manner to the first. So instead of taking the long east-bound flight home six hours later, I had to take an immediate West-bound flight, changing planes in Jakarta and London, to Florida. Arriving somewhat cranky & disheveled in Boca, I was rather pleased with the similar result (one switch, and out), except I didn't feel physically threatened after the Director read the invoice. This one just went white and slumped in his chair. I excused myself.
Back to the airport, and home to California. Still First Class. Four+ days on the road, literally once around the world, no hotel rooms, not a single proper meal, showering in airports, just to flip two switches. Such was the life of a field engineer. Tell that to kids these days ...
[0] This was in the halcyon days before ubiquitous cell phone, and I had left my DynaTAC at home ... it not only wouldn't have worked in Oz, it probably would have been confiscated at the airport.
As the great Bill Watterson taught us, "Verbing weirds language". Weirding is not a bad thing, especially in informal writing/speech. Unless you lack the humo(u)r gene, of course, in which case I feel very, very sorry for you.
Generic "you", not you personally, COCM. Allow me to beer you.
The problem with removing Orange Idiot in Chief early was that his replacement, that fucking nutcase Pence, was/is so bad that not even the conservative ultra-right old guard wanted him in the oval office, not even for a couple of months ...
Why do you think Cheeto hired him for the job? Made his spot in the White House bullet-proof for four years.
"pretty much every treasure hunting documentary"
Consider the source. It's not like the producers, actors, script-writers and intended targets are the sharpest tools in the shed.
For the record, I've only heard it called "cache" by the vast majority of the population (the Jr. High set has just discovered geo caching ... ).