So, many of you don't know, but I work in Information Technology. Well, we rolled out a new system and I updated the main webpage for logging into. One of the buttons on the page says 'For access to Time & Labour login here'.

We released the system today and I had 3 people point it out to me already how I spelled labor wrong . Unfortunately, the wording is in a jpg, so I have to do several steps to fix it.

***Shakes fist at Menzo, Ben, Andy, and all you other bad influences!***

Just tell them you designed the software in the UK...that should take care of the problem

Vic, Vic, Vic...I never thought I'd see the day when you fell victim to the Superfluous 'U' Syndrome.

Sharon

Vic,

A simple solution to your problem, push out a change to their office programs so it uses the British dictionary and then tell them they are spelling it wrong and if they don't believe you they can check!

Steve

P.S. Be thankful you don't have to deal with French keyboards

Don't forget to blame Kevin also! He's in US but confesses his 'love' for 'labour'.

Ieshwar

*sniffs with typical British snobbery.*

I understand that it's not an American spelling, but surely to god people recognize that it is at the very least a proper spelling. I was raised in Canada and educated in the States, so I occasionally use the American spelling, but people here still recognize that it is a correct way spelling it, even if they would add the 'u.'

Menzo (the bad influence)

LOL, I may indeed be to "blame" for throwing my u's around with Vic watching, but I certainly don't have a love for labour, in fact, given the choice, I'd favour leisure every time

Kevin (the innocent )

Do Australian's count as bad influences? I agree with Kevin. While I may labour, I don't love it. My preference is to favour leisure....

Of course!

Duh... hey, wait a minute!

I like the British! In fact I don't think this "President" thing is working out and we should beg the Queen to take us back.

I nearly choked on my morning Earl Gray...

I think this is the fifth discussion on British/Australian/Canadian/US-American spelling that I came across during my short membership at gayauthors. Whatever happened to open mindedness and tolerance? Let's embrace the other spelling as a broadening of our horizons, note it as a different cultural influence - different but not nececairly wrong.
(I think we really need Dom to post another chapter so we'll have more to discuss then spelling . I know I'm spoiling your fun )

Oh, we're just having fun. We're all friends here. Right? And friends come in package and some with their 'u-less' words. But this doesn't affect our love for them.

Ieshwar

all the british/american english spelling is just plain confusing. especially when you're learning the language and you read stuff on the net or in the books and they happened to be written by people living in america when you're supposed to be learning british english.
like, how could i know that in british english it's 'spoilt' and 'dreamt' instead of 'spoiled' and 'dreamed'... ^^' (minus points on the english test )
since it's almost impossible for me to understand what ppl in UK say (with all their accent and the speed they're talking with) i decided that US english is nicer

and 'color' looks neater than 'colour' anyway :]

Amen. I had to use one in Paris a few months ago and it was a real pain in the derrière.

In British, that's Earl Grey. There's no end to the misspellings we would be stuck with if not for Noah Webster.

Luckily with Labo(u)r, people now just think I'm pretentious.

Could you imagine if a web page included the word Lo(n)g? That typo would be harder to explain

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
-- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Different spellings may cause us to cringe, but they are nothing compared with the way we...British and Americans...change the meaning of words (e.g. "gay").

My English teacher used to do that to me, too, but I'm one of those militant students and kept aruguing with him because he told me we were learing Queens-English in our class and how I couldn't use the US-spelling (even though it's perfectly fine, the dictionary says so ) he even startet to correct my pron(o?)unciation (I spent some time in the US, so that's how it sounded) in several words. Like schedule (I still avoid that word) or advertisment. Luckily for me (and his nerves) I got another, more tolerant Eglish teacher a year later. I think it was still a traumatizing experience.



This reminds me of this book I read. The goverment scratches the word freedom so the people wouldn't be able to express what they longed for. Scary.




Gay to be gay ?

(another one is ass. I remember when they banned a fairytale from the library in the US because it had ass in it's title. Not as an insult.)

You could have told him that Queens is in New York.

When someone corrected Red Skelton's grammar by asking "Don't you know the Queen's English?", he replied "She is?".

LOL, yup, now you know the truth! We only discuss the really important matters here at gayauthors


Awww


The little n looked like it needed a hug?



Personally, I love alternate spellings as long as they're either acceptable alternate spellings or spellings purposely done for effect. It is troubling if someone doesn't realize the mistake, but if someone purposely and playfully exploits it I take no issue. I personally love cramming my words together into a lazy, phonetic concoction. For example:

gonna
sorta
didja
woulda
coulda
whadja
couldja
howdja
gimme
lemme

I'm also not particularly bothered by things like:

Nite
skillz
laff

and all the many other similarly spelt derivations. However, as I said the person needs to know the correct version first.



Ahh, that's a good example! I actually prefer "Ad verT is ment" to the American pronunciation ("Ad ver tize ment"), however I think "shhed ule" (as opposed to "sKed ule") sounds a bit like the person has a speech impediment.

Rest assured, given the recent rash of celebrities and politician (auto)biographies you'll find quite a few asses in US book titles nowadays




'ave a grate day ya'll N ta'ker
-Kevin

Good thing I now have a more tolerant English teacher (British, by the way, the other wasn't even British, he just insisted on the spelling and pronounciation)



rollin on da floor laffn

I know your list of phonetic concoctions wasn't intended to be exhaustive, but I feel compelled to add one: jeet.
All of these are more easily understood in conversation than they are when written.

um... i have to admit that i dunno (another one :]) what "jeet" is supposed to mean

Here's a clue by way of punctuation: jeet?

Did you eat?

Yeah. Jue?

are you kidding? O_o
you're not, are you...?

Did you eat -> did'ja eat -> ja eat -> jeet

lol...
*shakes head*
there's still a lot for me to learn (not that i didn't know that before)

thanks for the explanation

LOL, I recognized it too, but that's a very obscure one! It's also more likely that you'd have naturally understood it by sound, as well as context of course, if someone said it in person.

I had an oral English exam today and it was horrid!!!! I kept using kinda and even I noticed
*burries head in shame*

but I passed so at least that's something

*hugs*
congrats on passing the exam ^^=
*offers cookies*

i'm sure you did better than i would

Well you both seem excellent and natural to me. Indeed, if you hadn't said anything I could easily have been convinced that you were native speakers. I'm sure there must be some sort of accent that I'd pick up on in person, but as far as written text, you both seem fantastic!

*munchesoncookie* aww, thank you both!!!

Hmmm...I'm rather a huge fan of the Queen's English. Plus I spent my childhood going to british run schools. The longest i've spent in a American school is one year. So I know British way of spelling better than American spelling. My mom kinda reinforces British spelling to me all the time as well. In fact American way of spelling just looks so wrong to me
And that schedule word pronounciation "shhed ule"...my mom drilled that one into my head so much that now its stuck. I used to say it the other way "sKed ule".

So how do you pronounce 'School'?

"shhool" or "skool"?

Hah hah. funny you should mention that. My mom and me were just talking about pronounciations of 'school' a few days ago. I pronounce it 'skool' xD
Two to three years ago when I first came to live in New Delhi, I had to take tuitions in the local language 'Hindi' cause I didnt know it AT ALL. Not even the Hindi alphabet. My teacher didnt know english AT ALL either. Dunno how she managed to teach me the basics xD. Anyways, a lot of people who speak Hindi pronounce school 'iskool'. I used to get pretty confused when my Hindi teacher used to say 'iskool' in place of 'school'. Its some hangover from original Hindi (present day Hindi has a lot of Urdu words mixed in. In Urdu its just a normal 's') where there is no 's' by itself but there there is always a 'i' before the 's'. In other words Hindi counterpart for 's' is a 'is'
Lol Hindi is just confusing at times. Heh heh ^^;

It's similar in Spanish. When I went to see "Spiderman" I was confused when my sister told the guy at the counter "Eh-s-pheeder-mahn". Drive-trough is "MacAuto" and things like that, it's really entertaining.

The thing in Spain is not only people often reads english as it was spanish... The worst part comes when there's two english words *like White Label, for example* Then you have to read correctly one and literally the other one because, if you read both wrong, you're an idiot and, if you read both right, you're snob... Crazy spanish people... XD

As for the pronunciation of "schedule", I think the American usage of the "sk" sound versus the British "sh" is due to the influence of the German language in American colonial and early independence periods. Noah Webster apparently settled on the "sk" sound for his first American dictionary due to German influence. Since English is a Germanic language, it is likely that speakers of Old English used the "sk" pronunciation. The Angles (as in Anglo-Saxon), from which the name English is derived, were a Germanic people from Jutland (Denmark). The British "sh" pronunciation may be the result of Norman (French) influence.

There was even a strong movement to make German the official language of the US in its early days. I read somewhere that, as recently as the US entry into World War I (1916), Cincinnati, Ohio had six German language newspapers. They went out of business when speaking German became unfashionable.

I can't think of any word beginning with the letters s-c-h that Americans generally pronounce any way other than "sk". American radio and TV networks often use British reporters for their European coverage, so I hear "schedule" pronounced with "sh" frequently. Doesn't bother me; the accent has already identified the speaker as British. The British aren't as consistent as Americans; pronouncing "school" and "scheme" with "sk". The difference may be due to the letters that follow s-c-h, such as the "dj" sound between the two syllables of "schedule".

There is probably more confusion in the definition of words between Americans and British than there is in pronunciation, but I wouldn't want to start anything.

that explanation is a bit confusing to me. i know german a bit and know for sure that "sch" is pronounced "sh" in that language. for example german word for school is "schule" and is pronounced "shu-leh".
germans pronounce all theit "sch" as sh, as far as i know. so why would the insist on reading schedule as "sKedule" and not the other way around?


thanks
and yeah, there's an accent but my problem is my tendency to pronounce words weirdly at times
it's what you get from learning new words from books and being to lazy to check the proper way of pronouncing them at a dictionary

I just wrote that to see if anyone was paying attention.

I'm just kidding. It seems you are correct. I am not a German speaker, so I did some research before I posted my earlier comments. I did more research after reading your response and found information that contradicts what I had found previously. Although Noah Webster set the standard for the "sk" pronunciation, he must had some other influence besides German. Now I'm confused too.

I think the other information about the usage of German early in US history is correct. And, I thought of a few words beginning with s-c-h that Americans pronounce as "sh"; they are all German names such as Schubert, schnauzer, and schnitzel.

English is complicated, has a lot of words taken from other languages, and has more words any other language (I think). There is a saying that English is the only language with a thesaurus and the only language that needs one. But I could be wrong.

I was wondering the same thing but just shrugged it off because I didn't want to be a smartass about it . I'm a native German speaker and you're correct. Sch is sh. in any case. Guess I could have saved Mike some research time...

hehe, if you live in germany then we're neighbors
and i'm sure mikel won't blame you

No problem for me. I'm glad that the record has been put straight. If you two are neighbors and a friendship ensues, I'm glad for the mistake. It's a small world, after all.

It IS a small world. What neighbor country are you from?

lol, my country is a slightly closer neighbor to yours than mikel's XD
it's poland

what part of germany are you living in?

We're ALL neighbors (at heart)
I live in the south, in the heart of the Black Forest, but I'll go to the USA this month, so I'll actually be Mike's neighbor then. Hold on. What am I if I live in the same country as Mike? Not his neighbor. Missing vocab

You are welcome. Where in the US will you be?