well, stop it you naughty boy - cease and desist!
My caint help it. See there I go'd agin.
Forbear foul ravisher, anti-bibliophilic swine!
Unhand the fair language, or thou diest, malaproper!
Holy crap! You're an english-demon exorcist!
That is one of my lesser talents, yes.....
Wuht? ooze nickers are innah twist? right. Lay off the medieval drivel, you aussies aven't tawlked dat way fer ages!
Tah!
'Twasn't mediaeval.
'Twas English renaissance - Ben Jonson in "Volpone" to be exact....well, not exactly exact - 'twas fiddled with....
What DO they teach them in these schools....wanders off, shaking ears....sadly...
And - I don't WEAR knickers.......
I wear cottontails....
Lookit, we mericans live in a country filled with Qikstops and Krispy Kreme Donuts (that's my favorite, all three words in the name are misspelled.) We wear our clothes phat and our children type some kind of code into phones while walking through shopping malls. Whr r U?
And we speak Texican, leastways sum of us due.
Gotta go.
My heart bleeds for you...we should start a fund....send spelling books...
Hortress is gonna exorcise us all!
Ooh, that sounds dirty....
Yup - youall got exorcise books?
Yeah, naughty books a plenty, that's why we can't read or spell....we just look at pics and drool...
What's this, then, about some alleged 'Murrican inability to spell? If it weren't for the Yanks, English spelling would have gone to hell in an undecipherable (and unprintable) hand-basket quite a while ago. Seems to me American spelling makes at least some sense. Not much, I agree, but lookit what we had to start with. Frenchified spellings for simple words e.g. check and center. Insertion of totally unnecessary vowels in words e.g. flavor, favor, humor etc. And if anyone can explain to me how 'gaol' can possibly be pronounced as 'jail,' I'll be happy to explain why 'ghoti' really spells 'fish.'
Arrrr, go get a smeggin' avatar why don't ya...?
Awww, did I ruffle da bunny's fur?
In today's Chicago Tribune,
Nathan Bierma reports about an interesting book:
Quote:Endings: John Algeo's extensive new book "British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns" (Cambridge University Press, $34.99) is notable for what it doesn't cover. Most books on British and American English -- most recently last year's "Divided by a Common Language: A Guide to British and American English" by Christopher Davies (Houghton Mifflin, $14.95) -- look mostly at vocabulary. Algeo's study, which he says was more than 40 years in the making, focuses on sentence structure.
When a British English speaker says, "It was told me in confidence" (instead of "told to me in confidence"), or "The class was excused homework" (instead of "from homework'), it shows a British difference in what linguists call the "transitivity" of verbs. British English also has different rules for subject-verb agreement with "collective nouns," as Algeo shows in sentences such as "The club were in a Catch-22 position" and "Management do not accept responsibility ..."
Yet, Algeo concludes, "Few of the grammatical differences between British and American are enough to cause confusion, and [few] are stable because the two varieties are constantly influencing each other."
(The other part of that report [link above] is very interesting, too, I think.)
Hmmm. Thanx for the tip, Walter.
