On 30-Sep-16 08:18 AM, Bill Ricker wrote:
On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 1:59 PM, Kevin Kenny
<[email protected]> wrote:
What procedure do you recommend for those of us who don't have expatriate
Britons on call?
Officially we should read the OSM wiki.
( We can also watch BBC America and/or cultivate expat Brit friends. :-)
Oxford Dictionary (or Cambridge Dictionary) could be other references.
We Americans are, as you are well aware, entirely ignorant
of cultures other than our own. (And would the thing be called by the same
word in Glasgow or Cardiff as it would in London?)
Yeah, there's a reason the language is called English not British :-)
There's even strong dialect in England even before you get to Scots.
But they have a received standard that we can pretend is understood
throughout the English speaking world.
I would change "There's even strong dialect in England"to 'There are many
dialects in England'!
There was a BBC TV program called 'The Story Of English' (7 parts). With a
follow up book ISBN 0-563-20247-5
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p008drr6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FtSUPAM-uA
The TV program has subtitles .. at least the version I saw had ...
while the language spoken might be a form of English some need the subtitles,
or at least a rewind for a repeat!
The book maybe available in your local library?
To misquote Shaw (who, as an Irishman, could presumably take a neutral point
of view [yeah, right!]), the US and the UK are two nations divided by their
common language.
Or even better, misquoting Churchill misquoting Shaw to us in the provinces !
"The Queen's English? Of course I can speak the Queens English. I was born
in Queens."
That's a lovely contrast of quotes ! :-)
John Witherspoon on American English
"I have heard in this country, in the Senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit,
and see daily in dissertations from the press,
errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same
class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain."
Thomas Jefferson -
"There are so many differences between us and England, of soil, climate,
culture, productions, laws, religion and government,
that we must be left far behind the march of circumstances, were we to hold
ourselves rigorously to their standard...
Judicious neology can alone give strength and copiousness to language, and enable it
to be the vehicle of new ideas."
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