Here's a paragraph from the online magazine Slate's "International Papers" column today (other parts of the column mention observations about the Canadian federal election--as is evidenced by the article's title, "Canada Goosed" <g>; those who were worried about or who hoped for a minority government aren't going to get it, as the Natural Governing Party <g> won again): ___________ Whose language is it anyway? A smattering of English papers threw a wobbly this weekend after British schoolchildren were told to use "internationally standardised" spellings of scientific terms�for example, sulfate and fetus rather than the British "sulphate" and "foetus." An enraged teacher told the Daily Telegraph, "It's more to do with cultural imperialism by America than wanting to standardise. If America cared about consistency it wouldn't use feet and inches and gallons. Next thing they'll be telling us to drop the 'i' in aluminium because Americans can't pronounce it." The same teacher claimed the presence of "sulfur" in a pupil's homework is a clue that it has been downloaded from the Internet. The Independent also came to the defence, erm, defense of the mother tongue: "Are we really going to take lessons in language from the land whose president came up with 'It depends what the meaning of "is" is.' Hell, no!" ____________ The article can be found at http://slate.msn.com/InterNatPapers/00-11-27/InterNatPapers.asp -- reading it that way will give one hyperlinks to the various newspaper articles mentioned in that paragraph. (I would have sent it with the hyperlinks in HTML format, but I would undoubtedly have heard complaints. :-) ) --Kent
