> Ken, you *must* be new to this forum. Sigh. You've caught me out. I just joined this week. I was only trying to be helpful with respect to GPS ... I usually wait for a few weeks to judge the charcter of a mailing list before I make a complete ass out of myself.
> The fact that your link tells us that this is acceptable in American usage >says it all. We invented the bl**dy language, be guided by English rules! Well ... to be fair, one of the links arguing against data being a plural of datum was by an Australian, but I don't know if that's English enough :-) > I cheered the other day when someone in a film actually said vallit [valet] >when speaking of a man's servant responsible for his master's clothes etc. & >not 'vallay' as seems to be the norm nowadays. Think 'fillet of fish' >unless, of course, you patronise Mc Donalds [filay of fish] aarrghh! Heh, actually, "filay of fish" is the norm everywhere in the US. I've only heard "fillet" used when speaking in a mechanical engineering or welding context. David Cragg says: >I understand that, having declared independence, the first book the >new American nation published was a correct spelling book with all >the word spelled in the American way. I always wonder what the title >of this book was and if they did it just just to piss us off. If so >it seems to have worked. So what is next - you say date-a and I say >dat-a I have always wondered about that myself, so I did some poking around. While it wasn't the _first_ book we published as an independent nation, your summary isn't too far off the mark. The short answer is that Samuel Johnson published "The Dictionary of the English Language" in 1755 and those spellings became the UK standard (Johnson went around and just documented what spellings he found in common use). Noah Webster published "An American Dictionary of the English Language" in 1828 and those spellings because the American standard. The difference is that Webster was an advocate of spelling reform and his choices were influenced by his nationalistic political views. So saying Webster choose different spellings in part to piss off the Europeans probably has some truth. While I am not a long-time world traveller, I have done a significant amount of international trips for work and leisure and I can say that it was in the United Kingdom that I encountered some of the biggest communication difficulties in Europe (England wasn't so bad other than obvious American mispronounciations, Wales was "okay" as long as I didn't try to say the names of any Welsh locations, but I had to resort to pointing and hand gestures more than a few times in Scotland). It sure was a shock to find such a dialect variation in a relatively small geographical area. But I find that to be one of the joys of travelling: encountering something completely new and unexpected. But, enough off-topic discussion for me. I'll try to drag this back onto something canal-related. I saw some people mentioning using GPS on canals. My question is: is GPS on UK canals necessary? From the information I have seen so far, navigation on canals looks to be pretty simple; it's not like you have many choices on where you can go on most canals. Do canal junctions have good signage? I could see if you wanted to use a GPS to display your speed or the distance to a particular waypoint, but it doesn't seem like it would be as useful as a automotive GPS. --Ken
