I did hear that some genius had suggested that all boats allowed on the Monty
should in future be fitted with GPS to make sure they did not exceed the
various eco-speed limits!
Ken Hornstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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
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