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[Turambar]

I was replying to an emailfor an ebay item through Thunderbird and its spell checker picked up two spelling errors. The first one was the recipients email address which was from aol Thunder bird suggested i may have meant "gaol" instead of aol. Fair enough i thought but then the second one came, it suggested that instead of my ebay id Tar_Atanamir i may have meant "Guantanamo" :-?

Surely theres a conspiracy at work here..





(note to self: learn punctuation and grammar)

[PMC]

That's nothing, I typed "James Blunt" in MS word and my spellchecker changed it to "Talentless Length".

I swear that's true.

[mr_a500]

I was replying to an emailfor an ebay item through Thunderbird and its spell checker picked up two spelling errors. The first one was the recipients email address which was from aol Thunder bird suggested i may have meant "gaol" instead of aol. Fair enough i thought but then the second one came, it suggested that instead of my ebay id Tar_Atanamir i may have meant "Guantanamo"

That is scary. Did you offend the US government lately? If I were you (and I'm not - thank God) I'd avoid public spaces, change my eating habits, start driving on the wrong side of the road and get an official name change to "Billy Jim Bob" to throw them off the scent. :-D

(semi-related rant here)
I never use spell checkers. The main reason I hate them is that every single computer in Canada is configured by default to use US English. 99.999% of people never change default settings (probably because Windows will change them back to default eventually anyway). Apple is just as evil - inventing the term "North American English" as if Canada always used US spellings. Canadian English (basically the same as UK English) dictionaries are not even included in Canadian software anymore. They won't even let you purchase UK software unless you live in Europe! Now that's a conspiracy! (....he says before nervously peeping out the window for FBI agents...)

UK English

As a Canadian, you should know there is no such thing as "UK English". It's just "English". It is our language afterall! ;-)

[jkirk]

As a Canadian, you should know there is no such thing as "UK English". It's just "English". It is our language afterall!

and we stole it! MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

jkirk wrote:

and we stole it! MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Damn capitalists! ;-)

[PMC]

jkirk wrote:

and we stole it! MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

See? This is what Lend Lease has done for us... (Thanks for the fifty destroyers and P51's though).

[mr_a500]

As a Canadian, you should know there is no such thing as "UK English". It's just "English". It is our language afterall!

Yes, of course I know that. I say "UK English" because that is what the dictionary or software is labelled. I usually just say there is "US English", and there is "properly spelled English" ;-)

Just think - this confusion is all because of one man! A very "anti-British" American, Noah Webster, decided to publish a dictionary in 1802 which changed some of the spellings he thought were dumb. It seems he didn't like words with "our" and changed to "or" (honour->honor), didn't like doubling when adding "ing" (travelling->traveling"), and he didn't like "re" and changed to "er" (litre->liter).

Eventually all English will be US English. There is no way to stop it.

[metalman]

jkirk wrote:

and we stole it! MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than modern British English. So it's more like we refused to buy ANY updates! We then rewrote the dictionary (source code) to simplify English and get rid of those french spellings!

metalman wrote:

American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than modern British English. So it's more like we refused to buy ANY updates! We then rewrote the dictionary (source code) to simplify English and get rid of those french spellings!

There is no such thing as "British English" either.

There is English, and there are colloquial deviations of it.

It doesn't matter how much English gets {bleep}ised over the years, it's still English. ;-)