h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

<>

I'd say that this was more likely to be a problem than minor variations of spelling like tire v tyre. I don't know how many Brit English speakers would understand "semester", so I won't throw stones, but the different meanings of a the word "rubber" are a potential problem.

That said, it just is the case that there *is* more than one variety of (in this case written) English, but except in the rarest of cases this doesn't cause a problem. Nor is the language "set in stone" - as Blicky so rightly pointed out.

And I think az is right that English people are often snobs about the "purity" of the language, as if they were in some way its sole legitimate users.

Noggin

No reason why words can't have an aesthetic to them; ask anyone who does calligraphy.

But I agree that no-one is under any obligation to speak any particular form of English (although English as a whole is stipulated by the House Rules). If I was posting on an American site I'm sure I wouldn't remember to take out my 'u's. If anyone took me up on it I have a mock imperial act lying around somewhere that I might use.

<>

Very funny.

So you actually think that Douglas Adams meant for h2g2 to be a BRITISH ENGLISH site, do you?

This is *not* a British site, dammit. It's an international site , as visualised by DNA, and it isn't his fault that he died and it got taken over by the BBC. Okay?


az

All right, just a personal feeling of mine. I'm certainly not about to stop anyone here from using American English if they want to. It is a bit simpler, after all. But I do still think that the extra 'u' does make 'favour' look a bit nicer. I can't explain why; it's just my opinion.

My view on British and American English being considered different languages is a largely silly one, but it comes from the idea that if two dialects are not mutually intelligible, they are in fact two separate languages. I think the average person from either the States or Britain would be at least somewhat confused if greeted with a string of words in the other's dialect. This is the basis of my opinion. It's not a real one, though; the vast majority of my knowledge of linguistics comes from reading and re-reading David Crystal's 'Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language' and 'Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language', so granted it's not a very large spread of knowledge. What do I know?

<>

Well, that is obviously your opinion and you are, of course, welcome to it. It doesn't pan out in my own personal experience, being a Canadian (though I spell stuff with the extra pretty 'u') that there is all that much difference in language between the UK and the US.

To say that they are <> is, well, nonsense. They are in fact the SAME language with a few colloquial differences tossed in here and there, as well as different pronunciations. But it is the same language.

I really like the English language - all versions of it. Would be a shame if we all started talking like BBC radio announcers, wouldn't it?

az

<>

First, as Jez pointed out, proselytising is something Christians are required to do. But you don't have to listen! I've had JWs and Mormons come to the door, and a polite "no, thank you, I have my own religion" usually meets with an equally polite, oh, all right, and they leave. (Or, the JWs do. The Mormons are a tad more persistent, but "I'm busy, sorry" saw to that...)
I speak to the same way I do to any salesman (the last one was selling memberships to a karate club!)

How exactly do 'Christians' influence the law? Not in any way that hurts you, I'd warrant.

Anti-abortion laws, anti-gay marriage laws . . . to name just two Della


az

azahar, you really should read the Guide entry I linked to, before getting upset!
I was talking about my regret that NZ English is turning into just another variant of American. Everything that makes it a distinct variety is going, and being replaced by a mangled-voweled patois (vowel mangling being a NZ specialty ).

<>
That's just silly. See above. It was regret at what I see as American cultural hegemony. A Maori radio station here was under threat of losing its funding, because instead of playing Maori and NZ music, all it ever played was black American R&B, hip hop etc. A Samoan woman I studied with was greatly upset that her children were rejecting, and knew little about, their Samoan/NZ heritage - and instead wore American fashions, spoke 'American', listened to Eminem instead of the classical music she favoured.
<< If one says 'fill out' a form rather than 'fill in' a form, is this actually confusing?>>
No, that's not ambiguous, it's just stupid. Fill out? What on earth does that mean? It's like the term 'on line' used about queueing (Instead of in line) - that just conjured a peculiar mental picture in the 1980s, but now it is ambiguous.

<< Surely after several hundred years American English is just as valid.>>
I didn't say it wasn't valid (though to my mind it's ugly.) Just that it isn't ours, and I resent that it's taking over the world. It's one side of the American Empire. I suppose I should be thankful that all we have is Starbucks, McDonalds and Subway - not the jackboots and the bombs.

<<'Tires and Exhausts', seen outside a garage in West London>>



And completely enervates!

<< or the media is responsible for propalgating more American shows>>

"That's about the guts of it", EMR! (A NZ expression that is probably dying.
People of my younger son's generation (not him, we didn't have TV when he was young, by choice) have had a life time of exposure to American TV, and parents who've also had the same...

I was crossing a local park one day in 2002, and I heard a couple of girls, hidden by trees from my sight. I thought they were girls from the USA, saying in heavily West-coast accented voices "I was like - totally blown away!" and other such lame things they'd probably learned from 'The OC', 'Saved By the Bell' or the like. Then I walked past the trees and saw them - two Maori girls from the local Catholic school! (I recognised the uniforms.) My brother told me once that he had met a boy in Wellington (our capital) who said he wanted to go to "the capital" when he left school. When Garth pointed out that he in the capital, the boy said impatiently "No, I mean Warshington"!

>

Do you really think those laws are specifically Christian? I've seen elsewhere where you have said that you don't know any 'anti-abortionist" who's not a Christian, but that puzzles me - I have met many pro-life people who are Hindu, Muslim, secular or Jewish.

As for gay marriage - no way, am I touching that! (Except to ask if gay people actually want marriage? When the Civil Union bill was passed here, just last year, there was endless media discussion, some of it featuring gay people who said they couldn't care less about marriage.)

To all our resident Christians,

Hmmm...required to spread the word huh? It is something I regard in the same way as spam, junk mail and auto-diallers. It is an invasion of my privacy.

I don't care what your God demands you have no right to button-hole me in the street, or doorstep me at home. I would never, ever think of doing that to you for any reason. I just wish christians would extend us the same courtesy.

I have read your saviour's CV and wouldn't employ him, or his deeply flawed churches, to intercede with the divine nature of being if my very soul depended upon it. And yes, I know that's what you believe to be at stake.

Jesus's instruction was to a young church, a seedling at best, that had to grow or die. Well it's grown, it's blossomed, it went through decadence and revolution, and now it's fading. Your prosetylising has been done with a smile and at the point of a sword. It has been done with promises of paradise and with threats of eternal torment.

When will you all realise that times have changed, that if you are to get in touch with your saviour then you have to review the dogma of two millenia and begin again? A relationship with the divine, in any of its myriad forms can be a joyful thing, but it has to be relevant to the world as it is, not as it was under the Holy Roman Empire!

Oi vey! It just makes me so mad at times.

OK, rant over.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\

Hi Adelaide .

"Do you really think those laws are specifically Christian?"

Perhaps it is because these laws were framed by deeply devout Christian men in the mother of parliaments, to reflect the laws of the OT and NT, and were then copied by just about every other country in the world.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\

I can't speak for all the GLBT people out there, and don't claim to do so, but whether or not some gay people have said they aren't interested in marriage is irrelevant. Some heterosexual couples choose not to get married, too. The question is purely one of equal rights and opportunities. If you're going to allow heterosexual couples to be legally joined, you have to extend the same benefits to homosexual couples. You don't even have to call it 'marriage' if you don't want to: make every legal ceremony a 'civil union' and then let people get 'married' in a church if they want to. Religion does *not* belong in the civil system and just because some people have a (bizarre and illogical) religious objection to homosexual couples expressing their love, doesn't mean they have to foist that belief off on every single other member of the community, people who don't necessarily share their views!

The anti-gay attitude is one of the few I just cannot be tolerant or understanding of. I am a fairly active advocate for gay rights and same-sex marriage, especially at my school where we have a Gay-Straight Alliance. The fact that in the States I can get married to someone I love, yet my gay and lesbian and bisexual friends cannot is just sickening, and proof that my wonderful democracy is not all it's cracked up to be. Your sexual orientation is something you cannot change, and denying rights to people based on this attribute is no different than denying them based on someone's ethnicity or skin colour. It's uncalled for and, as my mom would say, 'primitive and tribal'. I cannot, will not, tolerate such an attitude. I'm sorry.

<> Now see, that's where I am greatly confused! I always thought that the "party line" so to speak was exactly that - sexual orientation was something innate, unchangeable, not a matter of choice, then on this thread I found people saying the precise opposite, and furthermore, telling me I was confused, it had always been a matter of choice, never innate, and my confusion about the former adamant insistence that they'd said homosexuality was innate, was - homophobia! http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F135418?thread=542008 What about that word anyway? I am not afraid of homosexuals, or even afraid of "the same" which is apparently what the word derives from... Also, check this out... http://www.queerbychoice.com/

What I have always been taught, and what I have always been told by my homosexual and bisexual friends, is that sexal orientation is never, or at least rarely, a choice. It'd probably be considered homophobic to assume anything at all about homosexuality, but your information is a revelation to me as well.

I think people once were truly afraid of homosexuals - more so in the days when everyone and everything was controlled by a fear of God and His Wrath. (Or is that the 21st century we're talking about?) They think/thought men who slept with other men and women who slept with other women are/were demons ore something of that sort. Now it's not so much a fear as a disgust or horror, and I'm not sure which is worse. I think most of the prejudice comes from ignorance - many people have friends who are gay, and they just don't know it! All their information about gay people and gay culture comes from the stereotypes promulgated by tv and word of mouth. This is why I think information about homosexuality should be part of sex education programs in secondary school - which it isn't, at least where I live. Yet another failing in society.

That "queer by choice" site makes it pretty plain that their motivation for claiming that homosexuality is a choice is, like that of the religious right in the US, in the broadest sense of that term political. That doesn't make them wrong, per se, but it does mean that their position is not based on any biological facts, and will probably be resistant to change in the light of any new facts that show up.

Noggin

Why should it be any different from heterosexuality, Echo? As a 'straight' myself, I have a long time buddy who, I'm sure, would have appreciated sexual favours from me. I thought that, as a good buddy, he had every right to whatever I could do for him. But could I bring myself to give him a bj even when I was dramatically pissed? I could not! Yuccchhh, it just ain't acceptable for me. Let others do what they like. It is *not* a choice.

toxx

Noggers, old chap. I hope that hatchet of our is now buried. Another simulpost! Weird.

toxx

Hey Az, if your post 23143 was in response to my post 23142, which seems right as its quoting it, then could you give them both another read through, because you seem a little pissed off with me for an opinion that I'm pretty sure I've never professed to hold.

Adelaide, I suspect that whatever element of choice is involved in homosexual attraction is broadly similar to that involved in heterosexual attraction. I see no reason to think otherwise.