American words are mangling our English.
on 06/05/2012 at 11:44 AM
Must I deliver the ultimate insult? Needs I must!
The author sounds like a petulant Frenchman.
But from my side of the pond, I actually support his views completely. I don’t want English people to start speaking and writing as if they were Americans. They aren’t, so they shouldn’t.
The greatest thing about reading the English newspapers ... your journalists have educated vocabularies and they aren’t afraid to use them! Oh, sweet love, forever tender. It’s even better than reading an Ann Coulter column, her and her $5 Footlong™ words, even if there isn’t a news jockey over there who isn’t a flaming red IMO.
Leave us to mangle the language into a universal tool: the English language may have 220,000 words, but I read recently that the American one has over 1,000,000. And it gets bigger every day, as we steal anything that seems usable from any language, and bend it around and enverbiate it until it suits our needs. We’ll knock out the vowels if there are too many, and if it seems easier we’ll just throw the whole thing out and use an acronym. And then we put them all to use - in an actionable manner. And there’s no haram in that: it’s perfectly kosher to us.
PS - very special blinders your writer has on, that blithely - and blissfully - ignore the depredations and defilements of your own chav subculture. Innit roight? Cha! Just you wait though: now that the commies have flooded the place with the dross of the world, your native tongue will soon be coated with mud, flies, and dung as their influence increases, changing the mellifluous cadences to the raucous cacophony of crows and vultures and the braying of asses.
Which means you’ll sound like Americans, only with worser accents. And that’s the real take-away. You want chips with that?
what about airlines and pilots@ English rules! ®
After spending quite a few years on the “English” side of the pond I still refuse to say: The Government, “are”.
Government is a “unit singular” and therefore the correct statement should be: The government “is”.
I wonder if some of this goes back to the Americans shunning all things English? the spelling of colour and tyre come to mind, sure sidewalk and pavement should be interchangeable, but pavement and roadway ?? I wonder if the term pavement goes back to roman times when the mud holes were replaced by paved roads, the army then marched everywhere and there were no cars so it makes sense to me. Trunk does make more sense than boot! bonnet and hood are interchangeable, we should not expect the Americans to speak english as it is not england! the real worry is they will all be talking a peverted form of spanish in 50 years!
Posted by Chris Edwards
06/06/2012 at 06:17 AM
And what about the wonderful “F word”, which, at least in American English”, can be used as pretty much EVERY part of speech...?
real worry is they will all be talking a peverted form of spanish in 50 years!
Someone is thinking fast. Wow Chris, I hadn’t even thought in those terms.
sound like Americans, only with worser accents. And that’s the real take-away. You want chips with that?
ROTFLMAO
I ran into that “unit singular” business when I started reading UK computer magazines, although I didn’t know the grammatical term. The first time I saw something like “Commodore are introducing a new Amiga....”, I thought it was just a glitch - due to the somewhat amateurish editing of computer magazines in those Elder Days.
Of course, I’d take this guy’s argument a lot more seriously if he’d complain about his entire culture being overwritten by turd world crap.
kjmerz,
It’s not just an American item. And besides in certain domains of America it’s merely half a word. At least that’s what my “mother” told me.
In Ireland the use of the “F” word is as common as that other obnoxious habit, spitting. Almost everyone from infancy to their death bead uses the “F” word as if it were a common every day verb, noun, adjective, adverb, etc.
Many times it spews forth crom the Celtic mouth sounding like Feck, but any way you get the message.
Gotta go now and pick up me feckin daughter. The little fecker is over visiting a friend. I hope the little feckers haven’t fecking got into a fecking feck-up or I’ll fecking feck them upside their fecking heads.
This was listed in comments at the site I got the story from. Thought you folks might enjoy.
I am reminded of a conversation I heard between and Texan and an Englishman many years ago. The American was asking why British people spelled “tire” as “tyre,” “aluminium” vs. “aluminum,” etc. The Brit answered, “Because we speak English, old boy, and you can’t really argue with us because, after all, we invented the language.” To which the Texan drawled, “Well, ya’ll might of invented it, but we made it user-friendly!”
06/05/2012 at 04:31 PM
06/05/2012 at 10:52 PM
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