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

How about the standard Eastenders greeting, Righ' Ma'e?

What's interesting is, that it's written 'disc' here - probably because we never translated it, but just took the invention together with the name.

Traveller in Time running ancient equipment
"The current DVD has nothing in common with the (digital) Video Discs, that was an entirely different system, even predating the standards for Compact Discs. "

Weren't Video Discs like big shiny LPs? They were terrible

Ok, to be as pedantic as can be, I now looked up DVD and this is what my Collins Concise says: abbrev. for digital versatile disc or (formerly) digital video disc.
Same result in wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD

I hate DVDs.

They make my gramophone needle skip.

Can I start another hare running?

"Definately".

RF

A mistake I'm guilty of having made very often

Speaking of the World Cup, which nobody was, in the US you will hear some that call our players, 'athaletes'. (By the way, in the US, our athaletes wear cups).

()

<>

New Zealanders do that, and we all live in the middle of the Pacific! One of the things that gets me cross, is the way NZers say 'woman' singlular when it's clear from the context that they *mean* women plural...

But the main thing, is people saying 'all y are not x'... when they mean 'not all y are x'...

How about the added misery when they would say, 'anymore, all y are not x'?

Oops, didn't close the quote. Too late now.

<>

Indeed!

Della, in British (and Irish) English, it is more usual to say "all y are not x" than "not all y are x". I prefer the latter, but the former is considered the "correct" way of saying it.

Don't you just hate people who are pedantic about things that they get wrong themselves?

The /all ... not/ thing annoys me too, Della. But that /anymore/ construction isn't common here, so I haven't heard it enough for it to get on my nerves.

Tell me, is it true that some rural Americans say 'most' when they mean 'almost'?

TRiG.

Hi, B'Elana.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD

This tells us:

"DVD" was originally an initialism for "Digital Video Disc." Some members of the DVD Forum believe that it should stand for "Digital Versatile Disc" to reflect its widespread use for non-video applications. Toshiba, which maintains the official DVD Forum site [1], adheres to the latter interpretation, and indeed this appeared within the copyright warnings on some of the earliest examples. However, the DVD Forum never reached a consensus on the matter, and so today the official name of the format is simply "DVD"; the letters do not officially stand for anything.[2]

The following link from that paragraph:
initialism > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialism
[1] > http://www.dvdforum.org/faq-dvdprimer.htm#1
[2] > http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html


The Initialism article says this:

DVD now has no official meaning: its advocates couldn't agree on whether the initials stood for "Digital Video Disc" or "Digital Versatile Disc", and now both terms are used.


Link 1 has this to say:

What does DVD mean?

The keyword is "versatile." Digital Versatile discs provide superb video, audio and data storage and access -- all on one disc.


Link 2 is the one from which I quoted earlier.

TRiG.

Can someone explain why the expressions "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" seem to be interchangeable in the USA even though their meanings are opposite?

I can't remember the name of the programme, but I can recall seeing something where two teenage girls (American) were arguing over that one. One was annoyed at the other for saying "I could care less", when it was obvious that she mean't she couldn't care less. So it probably irritates people over, too.

Things that irritate me include poor pronunciation. Even BBC newsreaders are guilty of it. I've lost count of the number of references to 'magistruts', or things happening in 'Cuventry'. The legal people are magistrates, and I grew up in Coventry. I know the BBC have a department that specializes in getting pronunciation right on awkward foreign words. I just wish they'd make sure the pronunciation was right on more common ones.

(I'm not going to drag this footballwards, I promise, but I was mightily unimpressed by the ITV continuity announcer the other day who was under the impression that Portugal were playing a country called Angora. I thought it was a mistake the first time, but she said it twice).