If I (a Brit) moves to the US, I'd absolutely get a Yorkshire-branded tea caddy filled with teabags on my desk. Sometimes you need to live up to the stereotypes.
I've always wondered, do that many brits actually like tea or is it more of a cultural thing? I've very rarely had a tea I like (though, I've never had one I actively disliked), and I can't imagine that's the case for most people but it makes me wonder
The majority like it, though there's always a debate about the correct preparation method. I've always felt like a bit of an outsider whenever a brew is offered and I ask if they have coffee, and I've lived here all mi life.
May be decorative only —- Isn’t it due due to their wimpy electricity that it takes forever to boil a kettle and that’s why everyone gets coffee externally? Or, absolute horror, they microwave teacups….
Being proud of your culture including your language and exercising it, at the risk of readers not understanding everything immediately, is not racism. In the worst case, a non-British gets curious about one expression or the other and looks it up. That's engagement.
It's funny, and perhaps not entirely unwarranted, that "racism" pops up here?
As a Black American, I find the author's idea extremely interesting and naturally began to wonder -- what might this idea (in code?) look like for us?
Owing to history and whatnot, the role "Black American English" might play is of course very much a moving target, but it's interesting to think about.
Is there an internationally agreed upon standard for designating AAV? I suppose it's a large and influential enough dialect it wouldn't hurt to have one
The main people who'd want such a thing would be linguists, so that they can label samples.
The non-prestige dialects of a language don't usually attract official interest, not least because officially the people who understand that dialect could also understand a prestige variant. Scousers may not talk like King Charles among themselves, but if he speaks they're not confused about what the King is saying even if they wouldn't use those words or say them that way.
This might get sketchier for Chinese topolects where the official government policy is that China has a single language, "Standard Chinese" but, those topolects sure do seem like different languages if you didn't know about the policy. However AAV is nowhere close to that, I can't imagine that anybody who uses AAV normally watches "Last Week Tonight" and goes "That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?".
In fairness, I think that's partly because AAV doesn't have the political and national identity that some other similar dialects have. I (as a lay person with no training in linguistics) feel like AAV and Scots are similar in terms of how far away from English they are, and many people would describe Scots as its own language, distinct from English.
But I think that national identity doesn't exist in the same way, do you know what I mean? Like, being Black/African American in the US is an important part of a person's identity, but it doesn't necessarily have the trappings of nationhood in the same way that Scottish identity does. That's not to say that the identity is any weaker, just that it manifests itself differently.
This means that AAV is culturally important, but there's not necessarily the same sense of "this is a separate language" that there is with Scots, even though in many ways it has all the same claims of being one.
I don't think it's nationalism per se, more just a national identity. You see independence movements across Europe (Catalan, Wales, Cornwall, some of these have more realistic prospects than others) that tightly bind the idea of nationhood to a collective language - we are all one people because we all speak the same language. And similarly, when larger countries want to suppress these independence movements, cracking down on their ability to learn or even speak that language is often a key tool used to do that.
Right, I think the major thing that both of you are unwittingly dancing around is the extent to which AAV is generally "popular," almost subconsciously. Especially in the US, but I'd argue the whole world.
It would be exceedingly difficult to strongly distinguish it from "Gen Whatever Slang" or "US Slang" or a lot of "LGTBQ Slang" etc etc. The list goes on.
Not really, no. AAV isn't just a form of slang, it has distinct and measurable grammatical differences from standard American English, such as its own verb tense, or a requirement for negative concord. You can measure these sorts of features quite clearly, and they are distinct from slang.
Scots is complicated because there was an entirely distinct language "Gaelic" which just isn't even close to English at all, spoken in that geographic area historically. Now, today there aren't very many people who live there who would even claim to actually speak Gaelic, but the influence of that language seeped into the dialect spoken there, so while the random bloke you meet in Scotland may not speak any Gaelic, if you (maybe as an academic study) know Gaelic some of the vocabulary of their speech is obviously from Gaelic, not English.
Linguists would tell you that Scots is a sibling to English rather than just a dialect of English, having both descended from Middle English and that the dialect of English people in Scotland speak is instead "Scottish English". In practice of course humans don't language tag their speech (indeed they rarely even language tag written text) so it's murky. Maybe one word in ten that a Scottish bloke just said to confuse a tourist was technically Scots not Scottish English and perhaps some of it was even Gaelic. The important thing was that they confused the tourist as desired, for which frankly even an inside joke would work.
Sociolects are fun. In one of my friend circles the word "fish" is understood to mean the controller for a video game, I don't know why exactly, but if you said to one of us "Pass the fish" they'd hand you a controller without even seeming puzzled, that's just obviously what you'd call it. But in another circle it means nothing and you'd be greeted with confusion.
You misunderstand the region. Gaelic arrived in Scotland as a medieval import from Ireland, and it never extended far enough south to affect Scots overall. The literature on English historical linguistics emphasizes far more the impact of Old Norse on Scots, as the Scots-speaking region was Norse-ruled for some time.
I have an amateur interest in linguistics, that's partially why I asked.
>That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?
Interestingly enough, I remember reading somewhere that you could be legally entitled to an interpreter in a court setting (take that with a grain of salt, I forget where I read it)
As a writer and amateur linguist I can always spot the people who don’t understand how AAVE works because they seem to think that it’s just “bad grammar” and don’t realize that it does in fact have its own grammatical rules. One that’s not exclusive to AAVE, but is common across most informal spoken English in the US (maybe beyond—I know there’s at least one Genesis song that uses this which suggests it may exist in informal British spoken grammar), is the use of the oblique case when a subject has two or more elements joined by and: “Steve and him went to the store” insted of “He and Steve went to the store.” (Ordering is also subject to different ordering with formal English dictating that the first person pronoun comes last, but informal English putting it first: “Me and him” vs “He and I.”
The other thing I find interesting is that formal English has eschewed the double negative as an intensifier while most (all?) other Indo-European languages employ it. Compare Spanish “No veo nadie” (literally ”I don’t see nobody“ which is the informal English formulation) to English “I don’t see anybody.”
the irony of an Englishman complaining about Americans assuming cultural expectations, whilst simultaneously doing the same thing to fellows from outwith England and Wales. Yes I did say 'outwith'.
I decided to have a bit of fun with the Accept-Lang header, if you're british it shows a totally different version of my blog including changing my name to a more british variant, a background including tea, phone booths, kings guards, busses, bulldogs and flags... and the colour scheme changes to RWB.
The original plan was actually to write two variants of every blog post, one where I write using dry wit, banter and colloquialisms, and the other with a more to the point and professional tone.
The reason I chose not to was because I thought it might be confusing when discussing the content on link aggregators (like HN)- I'm not so arrogant as to believe I write anything worth discussing, but it would violate the principle of least surprise... so I chose not to do it.
I'm curious to hear other peoples opinions, since this is the exact right subject to ask the question to relevant crowd..
This is definitely manageable: canonical meta tags and other metadata; update the URL to a canonical permalink that encodes the language preference; a banner that informs people that there is an alternate version, etc.
You might be interested to know that the BBC has a Pidgin version.
> BBC News Pidgin now dey on Whatsapp
> No dull yoursef, be di first to get latest tori, analysis, exclusive interviews and ogbonge coverage of Nigerian and International news from BBC News Pidgin, straight to your Whatsapp.
It reads very similar to the Hawaiian Pidgin Bible.
Da time wen eryting wen start, God make da sky an da world. Da world come so no mo notting inside, no mo shape notting. On top da wild ocean dat cova eryting, neva had light notting. Ony had God Spirit dea, moving aroun ova da watta.
Day Numba One
Den God tell, “I like light fo shine!” an da light start fo shine. God see how good da light. Den he put da light on one side, an da dark on da odda side. Da light time, he give um da name “Day time.” Da dark time, he give um da name “Nite time.” So, had da nite time an da day time, az day numba one.
Day Numba Two
Den God tell, “I like get someting inside da middo fo no let da watta up dea an da watta undaneat come togedda!” An dass wat God do. God make someting fo no let da watta up dea an da watta undaneat come togedda. Da ting inside da middo, God give um da name “Da Sky.” Had da nite time an da day time, az day numba two.
Day Numba Three
Den God tell, “I like da watta unda da sky come togedda one place, so dat get dry land!” An dass wat God wen do. Da dry groun, God give um da name “Land,” an da watta dat wen come togedda one side, he give um da name “Ocean.” God look da dry groun an da ocean, an he tell, “Real, real good, all dat!”
It's technically West African Pidgin English, AKA Guinea Coast Creole English, (perhaps) AKA Cameroon Pidgin, which seems to be much the same thing and has an ISO-639 code (wes).
IMO if these are all the same language then they should perhaps be dignified with a proper name that doesn't involve the generic term "pidgin".
I think that by exploring how different cultures and languages communicate about things opens the mind. There are concepts that can't be easily/succinctly explained in English but can in other languages. I think that we should be encouraging such breadth of thought because it allows us to appreciate new aspects of the world we live in.
I don't know. I mean it's not a longing for just a place, as I understand it. I am not even sure that hiraeth is necessarily longing for the beauty of a place or time. Hiraeth, it seems to me, could equally be a longing for the wordless Welsh expressions of emotion, or for rainy days, or damp, or a time that has passed, depending on where the bearer of the emotion is currently feeling it.
(I am not Welsh, but it has been described to me as an ever tightening elastic emotional rope that is anchored in a place and time that it might not be possible to go back to)
You could postulate that a language developed specific words for family and relatives because they prized those specific family structures? Or that language copied another language that did.
Similarly, you can categorise languages by how they group numbers, e.g. French is vigesimal while English is decimal.
OK, here's one: My wife grew up in Latin America. Sometimes, instead of saying "I knocked it over", they say what literally translates to "it fell itself to me". Same idea - it fell - but hey, not my fault, it just happened.
Here's another: "fíjese". It kind of means "you'd never guess what happened". It's like "something that was completely unpredictable and totally outside my control happened, and it negatively affected my ability to do what I was trying to do", except with a lot fewer syllables.
Here's one going the other way: I was talking to a systems engineer about a specific issue, and I said that "we might be able to sweep that under someone else's rug". He was from Russia, and didn't have "sweeping it under the rug" as an idiom, and so didn't know what sweeping it under someone else's rug might mean.
Now, none of these are things that you can't say in another language or culture. You can. They're just a lot more unwieldy to say, and so people express that idea a lot less frequently.
This was my starting point, a belief that other languages were 'better' at expressing different things. However, I have done a few projects requiring translation over the years and I have found European language speakers, notably Italian and German, preferring the freedom of English to the relative straightjackets of their respective mother tongues.
As a Brit I am biased, however, there is a crucial difference between 'free range' British English and 'simplified' American English. Superficially, American English seems the more 'free', with liberties taken to create cool words and brand names. However, American English is constrained by the work of Webster, with their being a definitive dictionary, very much cast in stone, with changes such as 'no u in colour' made purely because of a rejection of everything English, including tea and spellings.
Currently we have something more extreme going on with the language that Ukrainians are expected to speak, with their 'government' seeking new and improved ways to move the language away from Russian. If this was OG English then it would be like getting rid of every French sounding word, so 'beef' becomes 'cow meat', 'mutton' becomes 'sheep meat' and so on. These changes can be made quite easily since it is not a whole new language has to be learned (or unlearned) at once. The lists of banned/allowed words changes all the time, much like Newspeak in 1984.
This won't be the last attempt to determine what a language is by decree, however, the result of such efforts is that languages get stuck in time. Hence the observations of my translation 'helpers', preferring English to their mother tongues.
Hence American English is British English, stuck in time for 250 years, or whenever Webster got his special dictionary to schools. Meanwhile, OG British English has evolved in its own way, a form of direct democracy, where words change based on how they are used in the here and now.
I don't believe there is such a thing as an actual English word, all of it is 'stolen' from various colonial adventures of the past, or inherited from invaders of the past, notably the 'old enemy', as in the French.
French used to be the language for arts, diplomacy and the aristocracy. But they lost out, in part due to the fixed dictionary. Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was.
Currently there is an existential threat to English as the language for science and technology due to the rise of China. It gets worrying when data sheets for Texas Instruments components are released first in Chinese, to be followed up, months later with English translations. Hence I am rooting for en-GB rather than en-US, due to that minor detail of there not being a 'Webster' dictionary of the past, casting a shadow on our future.
> the fact that French is used less as a lingua franca
I think you are over-interpreting this point. Japanese has far fewer speakers globally compared to French. And yes, Japanese imports a huge number of foreign words -- akin to modern English. Ironically, mainland China practically has an alergic reaction to loanwords and creates natives terms for everything. Even weirder, Taiwan and Korea are somewhere in between. None of these places speak anything close to a "lingua franca" and have wildly different language cultures around loanwords.
IMO this take really overstates the importance of prescriptive efforts to control the evolution of languages. In particular, the relative decline of French is easily explained by geopolitics. Outside officialdom the Académie is mostly ignored. French today is as packed with English loanwords as every other European language.
Their comment is even funnier considering the sudden rise of Farage and Friends.
Their attempts to claim culture is governed by strong borders is also hilarious when an hour's drive in any direction from London would expose them to people they probably wouldn't even realise are speaking English.
I've always wondered why people who so proudly claim to not be from here speak with such authority about how it is to live here.
It's Fox news claimed no-go zones and Sharia law cities all over again. Utter bullshit.
There's a rather large and easily understood difference between wanting to preserve your Britishness in the face of the Americans, and joining Lennon-Yaxleys band of gammon faced flag shaggers (though flying the flag is less of a signal while the footies on).
There's two dimensions here, one is US-American readers, the other is how a lot of the rest of the (non-English) world is mostly exposed to US culture through (social) media.
But that's more of a thing for millennials, I would've thought younger generations get exposed to more diverse cultures / languages / etc.
Anyway, for British-English full of cultural references, watch some of these compilations https://www.youtube.com/@OneGazillionEccentricGoldfish, Scouse is nearly incomprehensible (to my ESL ears). For difficult US-English full of cultural references, watch The Wire or Treme. Try both without subtitles.
The funny thing is for younger British people this tends to be highly asymmetric - we can (sort of!) understand Scouse or Glaswegian due to growing up here, but also almost everyone under the age of 50 grew up on a steady diet of American TV shows, hip hop etc.
I can understand The Wire fine without subtitles because most of the actors just speak relatively generic African American English instead of a proper Baltimore dialect, and that's no problem at all for someone who spent their formative years consuming Nas and Biggie and all the rest of it.
On the other hand Snoop who is the only main character with an actual Baltimore street accent is pretty much unintelligible to me, but I suspect she would be for a lot of middle class americans as well
See my other comment, the world follows the US. It's about where the influence is primarily coming from, and that is currently America. And in terms of English it has a distinct advantage in that it is full of native speakers. Many Indians are proficient in English but they're not native speakers.
Go to France, or Japan, or Hungary, or somewhere like that. Someone there is visiting a web site that is in English. Now, what English is it most likely to be?
My guess is US English, not UK English, not Indian English, not Chinese English. Sure, they may visit some of those sites, but I suspect that the most frequent will be US English.
Correct, generally speaking they will have their own default locales on their computer and local sites will be in e.g. French but going to Instagram it will render in US English - unless the app has been translated, which it probably has so it's not the best example.
I'm in IT right now having travelled through FR, DE, NO, PL and half a dozen more countries. When selecting the EN option on a website it is almost 100% of the time with a GB flag. The spelling is mostly en-GB as well.
In this case, Japan is special. There relationship (post WW2) with the US is unparalleled compared to France or Hungary. It will absolutely be US style. Japan was never very close with the UK.
Most countries in North East Asia or South East Asia (exclude South Asia) teach US-style English. A few that come to mind: South Korea, Taiwan, Mainland China, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia.
According to wikipedia, there's 128 millions of en-IN speakers, of which only few hundred thousands are native - while there's 248 million native en-US speakers.
You raise a great point here. At what point will a non-English speaking country become the nation with the most English speakers? In my mind, surely that is Indian by 2050. If they can become upper middle income by that time (I am sure of it), then I guess more that half of adults will speak English at least at elementary to middle school level. (Dear reader: Please don't read that as a slight against the English language skills of Indians. I know from personal experience: With five grade level language skills, you can get a lot done!) They would way out number the number of English speaking Americans.
This is more or less completely false. English has an unusually high number of loan words from French (on the order of 10k or so, I think), and this has made the language less Germanic than its historical origins would suggest. But English existed before Norman French arrived in the British Isles, and is still at heart a Germanic language.
I have to admit I have every device running some sort of voice assistant on en_GB the American voices always sound like parodies or the Walmart greeter.
> American voices always sound like parodies or the Walmart greeter.
Timer set for “thirdy minnids”. Unfortunately the others also sound like parodies in their own way — the Californian's idea of en_GB, “Oi, you go' a loicense for that thir'y minute timah?”
TBF, some Australian accents put a rising intonation at the end of sentences, as though the speaker is always asking their interlocutor for approval. Just another thing that's reminiscent of Clive James' remark that too many Australians are descended from prison officers.
I would love to be able to write in proper narfuck, and have which ever screen reader read it out in the authentic accent for that area (central norfolk, not norwich, broadlands or the wierdos in the fens.)
There is something deeply joyful (to me) about a thick regional accent.
I discovered just this week that the numbering of weeks within the year is different between US and Europe, thus, cal -w can show different numbers for some years depending on the locale. Outlook can probably also show different things depending on the system settings.
Europe uses the algo according to the ISO 8601 standard, where the week no.1 is the one with January 1st occuring between Monday and Thursday, inclusive. If the 1st happens on Friday or later within a week, it's considered a week no.52 or 53 of the previous year.
US does not use this scheme and (I guess) is numbering week no.1 when January the 1st occurs whenever within that week.
Some companies use week numbers in business talks, planning and scheduling, so be aware who is speaking about which weeks!
The amount of times that darn keyboard selector appears for no reason in Windows because its once again added en-US as a language, which it then switches to randomly for seemingly no reason and all of a sudden my symbols are all in the wrong places. One day someone at Microsoft is going to look at that bug and fix it....
I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use, and I've found myself significantly changing the language I use to a very utilitarian and direct style to prevent the endless blank stares... reading this blog post just made me realise that this self-editing has made my interactions rather more 'flat' and unnatural, as they now lack spontaneity, with everything passing through a secondary filter before leaving my brain.
I've had the pleasure of working with many different people from different backgrounds, including many Brits. I've always found the dry, understated humor from them to be endearing, making casual conversation more interesting. My parents are both from the Middle East, my wife is from Southeast Asia, and I have many Middle Eastern, Desi, African American as well as African (as in continental) friends, so I may not be a "typical" American in that regard.
That being said, don't underestimate the value you bring by sharing your cultural insights. I don't think I told anyone to their face that appreciated their cultural value, but I hoped that my engagement and cheerfulness in dealing with them at least communicated that I was happy with their presence.
It might be that your engagement with someone opens them up to a part of the world they've yet to experience or know much about. Granted, there are lots of places with more gaps than the US and the UK, but there's still value in that and I started with those examples but mentioned it comes from all sides.
Cultural insights are one thing but the issue is if you slip into full flow of Britishisms and let your accent loose people who only speak English as a second language can't understand what you're saying.
There's nothing unique about this though, it's the same for every language - it's one thing knowing Spanish well enough to hold a conversation where the other person is speaking slowly and making it easy for you, it's quite another to be able to slot into a group of native Chilean Spanish speakers in full flow
> My parents are both from the Middle East, ... so I may not be a "typical" American in that regard.
If you are from Detroit or Houston, then that would sound typically American to me. I say this over and over again on HN: The US is simply too big and too diverse to generalise about. It's better to pick a region, then generalise. The US has roughly 6-8 big cultural zones. In comparison, Europe, which has fifty countries is infinitely more diverse than the US, even if we only look at native Europeans that live there. Think about it: Germany shares a border with France. Literally, it is like Mars vs Venus in terms of their culture and language. And there are many more examples. There is nothing like it in the US.
I live in Sweden (and have for 11 years), a lot of the "charm" in my speech has been filed away, I speak in a very neutral accent (which barely registers as british anymore) and I use americanisms a lot, avoiding "false friends".
(IE; I never use the word "chip" to mean crisps or fries - I will instead use "Crisps", despite it being british, and fries, despite it being American; in order to avoid ambiguity.)
The more difficult one is "pants", I would say underwear or trousers.
It's interesting how I only notice how much it's contrasted when I go back to the UK and hear others, I notice people using words that I've put a mental "X" on, and its only then that I realise that I've put the mental "X" on the word... because it no longer feels natural to hear it.
> (IE; I never use the word "chip" to mean crisps or fries - I will instead use "Crisps", despite it being british, and fries, despite it being American; in order to avoid ambiguity.)
In Australia we don't care about ambiguity or clarity and refer to both the thin sliced cold things and freshly fried rectangular ones as "chips"
I think everyone says “couldn’t care less”. But Wiktionary does say “could care less” is “American, nonstandard, proscribed”, so I guess only Americans have that (defective) alternative phrase.
I don't do the "chips" one, because it's usually clear enough from context, and the people I speak English to generally know me and my foibles. But I do religiously say "half past 6" now, instead of shortening it to "half six". In Germany, you count towards the next hour, so our "half past six" is their "half to seven".
To avoid ambiguity, I always say "half past" in English so that Germans (and I!) remember to compensate for the language barrier. Unfortunately "half to" isn't really a thing in German, so I can't do the opposite when I'm speaking German.
It's more complicated than this and how you say "quarter to eleven" is A Whole Thing in Germany, but everyone agrees on the half hour at least
I have a cunning plan: Sneak as many Brits into Hollywood as possible, and have them slip in as many British references into American films as they can. Over time, they'll effectively BECOME British, and all will once again be well in the world!
I experienced this. I only lived in the U.K. for 6 months, but the number of chiefly British phrases/words/idioms that nestled their way into my way of speaking and stayed (20+ years on) was interesting and somewhat surprising.
For example, I never said "supposed to" again — "meant to" has always sounded and felt so much better. Similarly, "can't be bothered/asked" often exactly describes the situation in a way that "I don't want to" seemingly can't.
I'd also like to add "bum bag" v. "fanny pack" was a valuable lesson and a memorable laugh.
I have a similar experience, for the last 5+ years I've worked in companies where very few of the people I work with are British which does require care on both language and idiom. Combined with being older than a lot of colleagues, cultural references need to be picked with care :D
I had that when workign with a lot of other Europeans. When I moved to a company where everyone was British I had to re-adapt, particularly because I'd become more direct after working with a lot of Germans.
I'm often shuffled into teams where I am the only American and everyone else is Indian, working in India, and I take a small measure of pride in switching to the formal register that Indians like to use in workplace English, and using the idioms they have.
Are your other department members (a) native English speakers, but not British, or (b) non-native English speakers? In my experience, there is a huge difference. I am a native English speaker. When speaking with (a) but from a different region, you can usually speak in your normal style, but don't use too much slang. With (b), I remove any slang and choose my words much more carefully. My goal is to communicate well, even if I need to adapt my style.
When I moved to the states nearly 20 years ago, my pronunciation sharpened up (stopped dropping consonants) very quickly. Over time I stopped using idioms, and the few bits of Cockney Rhyming slang I used (Butchers, Scooby; which are look, and clue, respectively).
I think it was less as a conscious act and more as a result of just not being around people that use them. There's a sizeable element of cultural reinforcement involved.
That said, they'll pry my British spelling out of my cold, dead, hands.
I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use…
Oh, fer feck’s s sake, it’s not like the U.S. hasn’t had Monty Python for fifty years. Me, after a steady diet of British motorcycle magazine’s for the last 40 years, I speak Brit just fine. But I would think the diversity and prevalence of online forums would get folks up to speed. I dunno, maybe people just don’t pay that much attention.
OTOH, I do recall an Australia coworker who expressed appreciation that he didn’t have to explain idioms to me (Oz has moto mags, too). Obviously it’s a real problem even in this age of connections.
I worked in a US office for a while (but with a few other British people as well). I didn't feel the need to edit my sense of humour luckily, but I purposefully switched to saying things like "sidewalk", "elevator" and "bathroom" because it made interactions a lot easier.
I'm American, but I've said "washroom" for a long time because I'm not asking to take a bash, but at least I wash at some point afterwards. Most people seem to understand fine, but I do get a few now and then.
Funny story, I was visiting Hong Kong one time, and asked the young waiter, who seemed to speak English just fine, where the washroom was. Blank stare. Bathroom? Cesuo (Mandarin)? All blank stares. I was a little out of options at that point... Turned out the word I was looking for was "toilet", which is a word I never use.
Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but nobody has any moral obligation to be inclusive in content they share on their personal blog, for free, and nobody should reasonably expect it.
Excuse me, but I believe you meant to say this bloug is written in en-GB.
More seriously... you know, 30 or 40 years ago, I can sort of understand this attitude. Today, in the amount of time it takes you to complain, you could have popped the word into Google or something instead and learned what it was instead. Probably in less than the amount of time it took you to complain for an online blog. And you might learn something interesting.
When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a thing called the "generation gap". It originally referred to something closer to the difference between the Hippies and their Greatest Generation parents, but it was smoothly repurposed into the differences between GenX and the Boomers, and the way we could have slang that was not decodeable by our parents.
I haven't heard the term in a while. The "generation gap" isn't what it used to be and there is less need for a term for it. I'm not entirely certain but I probably heard about "6-7" before my kids did. Urban Dictionary may not be the most reliable source in an academic sense but you can get a very fast sense of what something means from its entries, especially if you read them with a postmodern analysis eye and not just for the plain text.
I also find it a bit weird when people my age or the boomer generation complain about the kid's slang, because it's so easy to decode. You can't possible have a national-level kid's slang without an internet explainer 15 seconds away. It's not that hard anymore.
I've had a weblog since 1999. I know where the word comes from. Try rereading in light of that; if you need more hint consider why the author's spellchecker might put a red wiggly underline under the letters "color".
Consult BigTTYGothGF's reply to my post for more cluestick. (If I'm channeling the late 1990s might as well go all the way and pull out some dead lingo.)
The term "log" as a list of entries in some kind of journal predates the internet in en-GB by several hundred years, having strong nautical origins on the ship's log. It is the origin of "login" too (entering entries into the log), or do you assert that it should be "lougin" too?
I was raised by an English mum[0] (scouse, to be precise -actually, her mum was scouse, me mum was posh).
I've traveled all over the world, and the one place that I've had the most difficulty understanding, was London. Cockney is hard. It's not just the patois. It's the cultural references and slang.
I read several blogs that use British English, including this OP's blog. Some of my favourite blogs in my RSS reader are British English blogs, or at least they use British English spellings and grammar. I find their use of the English language very charming and funny in a unique way.
It surprises me that anyone would feel entitled to ask a blogger to change the variety of English they use. American English is only one of many forms of English. The world is richer for its many varieties of English, and languages, and that diversity makes it more interesting, not less.
Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished. Diversity is only a good thing when your mind has been poisoned by "education" and "experience".
It requires an open mind to see diverse experiences as a good thing, and certain cultures think having citizens with open minds is an unprofitable way to run a society.
Historically many (predominantly muslim) places in near and middle east have been very diverse, though maybe not exactly the kind of diversity usually conceptualised in the west. If anything, the idea of homogeneous nation states is more like rooted in the enlightenment.
Extreme Islam acts like that, as does extreme Christianity or any extreme religion. Out of all the Muslims I've met and all the Christians I've met, the Muslims have been by far the more tolerant (granted, I live in the US so there is a very obvious bias in both directions)
I think you make an too easy argument:
Compared to e.g. Christian places in Europe where people still the same tongue like before the Christianisation (roughly speaking), Aramic, Demotic or Berbic languages, once majority languages are now minority languages in Arabic enviroments. Ironically Aramic and Demotic are spoken mostly by Christian minorities.
Also I see the Islamic movement in recent years pushing for Islamic homogeneous countries and driving ethnic, religious, language and sexual minorities out of their homelands (mainly into Europe).
Compare to today (often secular) European counterparts Arabic nations are homogenous and root cause was Anti enlightenment ideologies.
While this was definitely true historically, it's becoming much less the case. Plenty of minorities have had to flee the Near/Middle East from persecution or genocide. The Middle East has become massively more (orthodox) Muslim in the last hundred years.
> the idea of homogeneous nation states is more like rooted in the enlightenment.
More precisely the Peace of Westphalia, which was a deal between the crowned heads of Europe to stop rocking the boat, and the absolute opposite of what the Enlightenment wanted since it was designed to consolidate royal political control.
The striving for a linguistically homogeneous nation state in Europe is strongly associated with the French Revolution, which was one of the major expressions of the Enlightenment. It was then that a centralized government began strongly sanctioning regional languages that the monarchical regime had largely left alone (albeit out of any official use).
After that, the next big wave was the revolutions of 1848, which were inspired by national romanticism, but it’s valid to see that as an evolution of ideas that first arose in the Enlightenment. It certainly wasn’t out of any belief in royal absolutism.
Is it bait? I'm pretty sure it's a reasonably factual, albeit general claim. Asking chatGPT for country-specific examples for instance gives this:
> Yes—some countries have (at various times, and in some cases still today) adopted policies aimed at making the population more “homogeneous,” through segregation, assimilation pressure, or exclusion/deportation. Concrete examples:
- South Africa (apartheid era, 1948–1990s): An official system of racial classification and enforced separation (“separate development”).
- Germany (Nazi period, 1933–1945): State ideology enforced a racial hierarchy and pursued forced removal and mass murder of those deemed “undesirable.”
- Israel (state policies affecting Palestinian citizens and occupied territory, especially since 1967): Includes laws and administrative practices that many observers describe as producing or enforcing unequal status by group; key issues include citizenship status differences and restrictions tied to national/ethnic identity.
- Myanmar (Rohingya): Policies and law enforcement that stripped/blocked citizenship for Rohingya and enabled persecution, culminating in mass violence and displacement.
- Canada (Indigenous assimilation policy, especially 19th–20th century into 1996): Forced assimilation via residential schools and bans on language/cultural practices; many have characterized this as cultural genocide.
- United States (Jim Crow + earlier immigration/citizenship rules; and internment): Historical legal regimes created segregation and restricted citizenship/naturalization based on race/national origin (e.g., earlier Asian-exclusion immigration restrictions).
You may disagree with some examples on this list, but I'm sure even you would consider that the first two are clear examples of diversity-fearing 'cultures' rather than 'bait'. And this is even before considering the wider definition of the word 'culture', which can be even more exclusionary.
Fair point. I did not write my response from a historical viewpoint. I was writing from a current persepective. To give credit to their reply, many of their example are correct. With the exception of some very backwards dictatorships, at this point, pretty much most countries value some diversity. Plus, after 2010, all people under 30 have watched thousands of hours of YouTube, so they know the world is big, cool, and very diverse.
I clearly didn't "post generated text" masquerading as human insight in the manner cautioned in that context.
I, the human, demonstrated that even an LLM, which in this context can be viewed as an impartial source, could easily find legit examples.
I could of course have simply stated that this is the case without pasting the LLM text, but in that case I'm fairly sure OP could have simply replied "Nah-uh".
Mainland Chinese gov't claims to have 56 official ethnicities in their country. They are certainly celebrated by official media. In particular, they seem to love the southwest portion of the country (Guangxi and Yunnan) with many mountaineous regions and various ethnic groups, mostly because they do not protest the central gov't. Also, look at the coins and bills of yuan -- many different ethnicities.
The PCR’s official diversity has been a Potemkin village since the 1970s. Yes, the coinage still shows multiple languages, and the Chinese do love their touristy ethnic villages where people dress up in traditional clothing (though often these are outside actors instead of actual locals). However, there is almost no room for minorities to use their own languages; even in the family circle there has been increasing pressure to switch to putonghua.
Around the turn of the millennium, Muslim Uighur radicals got a lot of attention in the international press. But what most of the world had not followed was that before that, there had been conflict between secular Uighur Communists and the central government because the former saw the space for use of Uighur shrinking. Those Uighurs were silenced or forced into exile abroad, leaving only Islam as a channel for ethnic discontent.
Right. As a Brit I am entitled to think we speak the best version (because we do; ISE is a close second) but I am not entitled to believe everyone else's is wrong, because that is ahistorical. They have diverged repeatedly.
I have never heard of a thing called “Indian Standard English”, nor (as an Australian who has moved to India) does it sound a very realistic concept. Can’t find any search results for it as a phrase, either.
I agree in general, but there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. This means roughly the opposite in British and US English, and there's often insufficient surrounding context to alert the reader to their error.
(OTOH I don't think you should suppress 'false friends' like biscuits, pants etc.)
Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".
I'm British but I always understood it as the second meaning. e.g. "We were going to consider XYZ but now it's a moot point because the project is cancelled."
There are a few others. “Quite” comes to mind — “I am quite hungry” or “that meal was quite good” can mean opposite things, depending on the speaker region and even voice inflexion if spoken.
Honestly it's not the first time I read such comments, and... they're not about the British as much as they are about the Americans, I'd say.
I think almost all of the expressions in the left-hand side have direct, almost literal equivalents in French for example, with the same meaning as they have for the British, including being very context-dependent.
Also works for Flemish by the way, although the Dutch are supposed to be more literal so maybe Flemish/Dutch is to be seen the same way as British/American.
Quite, indeed, has no simple meaning in British English. Any non-British attempt to assign one meaning that is different to their regional meaning is doomed to failure :-)
The way Americans speak and write, when compared to actual English, is terrible. No structure, wrong and misplaced punctuation, and lax grammar (if any). Speaking is even worse: a diarrhea of filler words, like 'like', 'I mean', and 'you know'. Practically no living American knows neither the word 'whom' nor when to use it. It's as if grammatical casing had been declared unconstitutional. If you ask me, it's more a speech impediment than any other classification.
But the thing is that every one (at least those below a certain age) speaks like this these days, thanks to the non-stop American content online. So it's basically normalized. This is why it's on my publish wish list that someone develops an AI that can filter out the American-ness, thereby Making English Great Again (MEGA).
Further, I think that institutions (those pertaining to education, at least) elsewhere in the world should issue PSA about too much exposure to American content--both written and spoken--and offer or mandate detox sessions.
Perhaps the only American to whom (there it is!) I can bear listening, is Steven Pinker.
Imagine someone wrote a blog in some obscure language that few people speak. If you happen to know that language, you'd think wow this is great. If you don't happen to know that language, you'd just think it's a shame. This is the same thing, just to a lesser degree. Some people might be interested in putting in the effort to learn a bunch of foreign cultural references, but not everyone.
The French didn't like it when the Lingua Franca switched from French to English and the Brits still whine that British English is no longer the dominant variety.
It's a trade-off: you can write in your regional dialect or you can write in a more widely understood global style.
Or more generally: either everyone uses it or it stays the same.
Every now and then, France has officially doubled down on the latter — attempting to avoid Britishisms and now more generally Americanisms from official language. There used to be a measure of sympathy for this from us Brits — we can certainly understand why it feels frustrating to have Americanisms in our language — but I think the British perspective has shifted a little.
And if it doesn't, it should. We Brits should shut the fuck up about our (actually anachronistic, ahistorical) belief that contemporary Brits speak the One True English, because (especially post-Brexit) the fact that the world speaks any form of English is one big thing we have going for us when it comes to global trade.
English was a gift to us, arguably, from its forbears, and it is now perhaps our least divisive gift to the world. We speak our version of it and we should be proud of it. But we should equally be proud of its amazing diversity in the world.
FWIW my view on this used to be the old-fashioned one, until in the early 1990s I had a wonderful, hilarious, charming Indian professor at uni, and got to understand how beautifully English changed in India. ISE is often rather witty and poetic. Later in the 90s I read The God Of Small Things and it really crystallised — English is far too important for us to fuss about.
Nobody speaks the One True English. That is its power.
It's not really comparable, almost every native English speaker can understand most British English fine, it's only when people use excessive slang or regional accents that people have issues (and that's an issue with any language - it can easily be an issue among native speakers within the UK!).
It doesn't really matter if you natively speak British English instead of American English, whereas French and English are obviously completely different languages and the switch made French a lot less useful and English a lot more useful
Oxford spelling, en-GB-oxendict, is a nice halfway house - it uses the same -ize spellings (where etymologically correct) as American English, but doesn't have the simplifications (eg. color->colour).
Should probably have told the writers of Wicked to not associate Elphaba with a (children's book level) evil witch. I think the Wicked Witch of the West is pretty appropriate for JK
Regarding spelling: As an unbiased foreigner, many American variants seem superior to me (color, defense, program, meter) with british just being weird (and/or tainted by the french).
Regarding Rowling: It seems to me that she gets more pushback/hate being, say "50% modern left-ish" than people that are even less aligned with left values. This gives me kinda medieval religion vibes (better an unbeliever/outsider than an apostate). I think such a valuation system is inherently flawed. Curious about your view on this.
Richard Dawkins and Robert Winston have both said similar things to Rowling and are left-leaning (one is a Labour peer). Neither have received anything resembling the backlash she has.
I personally have massive problems with Rowling because of her transphobic views, as I am a transexual woman and she completely misunderstands us and has used her influence to make our lives hell in the UK. The rest of her political views aren't something I give much thought as she isn't nearly as influential in those areas
>Sidenote: If you're referring to the zombie-ant fungus, those go by Ophiocordyceps nowadays
Neat. I should probably explain why I called her that. She started noticeably becoming more unhinged a bit after she posted a picture of herself in a house that very clearly had a mould problem. Thus, as a way of coping, we (as in, the subset of the trans community I partake in) started joking that her views were caused by the mould
I can see how being personally affected would change the outlook on things like this.
It just seems to me that often people that are politically still "somewhat close" (Rowling) catch more flak than politicians that associate "transgender" with something inbetween "subhuman" and "delusional", but don't talk about it too much (because their whole electorate coulnd't care less about the topic anyway).
I had a similar impression with political fragmentation on the non-Trump side in the last US election.
But maybe the behavior is even net-beneficial in some cases, and you gain more as a movement by pushing against a Rowling instead of a Farage.
Do you think Rowling has more political effect in the UK than UK politicians, or are you talking global influence here?
My own somewhat cynical take is basically the Planck-principle: Actual progress mostly happens one grave at a time...
I still think from a political effectiveness point-of-view, pushing against Rowling is almost completely futile, because she has no electorate to satisfy and her view (from what I understand, her focus is on "protecting" cisgender women/their spaces from maliciously misdeclared transgender women?) is strawmanny, but difficult to just dismiss/pick apart.
But I can see now how perceived "betrayal" and actual public engagement with personal issues would elicit a much stronger response than an ideologically even more distant politician that just hates you quietly. Thanks for the discussion!
What I mean about political influence is limited to the UK. While it's mostly futile, a lot of us grew up with her works and don't want others to support her work through merchandise and stuff
You are a man and, like all men, need to refrain from imposing yourself on women's spaces. If you, and other men like you, stopped doing that, then there would be no problem. This is an issue that is entirely behaviourally self-inflicted. All you need to do is respect women's boundaries.
I am very much not a man. I don't look like a man, act like a man, from what I've been told I don't think like a man, I don't have the body of a man, very soon I will not have the genitals of a man. I am quite possibly the least threatening person you'd ever meet. All the other women in my life see me as a woman. If you saw me on the street and I didn't tell you the circumstances of my birth you'd have no idea I wasn't born a woman.
Tell me, in what way am I a man? What danger do I pose?
425 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 70.3 ms ] threadWho are they?
Who are they?!
Or has the situation improved? :)
Also, I've never understood the disdain for microwave boiling. It's just easier 90% of the time
As a Black American, I find the author's idea extremely interesting and naturally began to wonder -- what might this idea (in code?) look like for us?
Owing to history and whatnot, the role "Black American English" might play is of course very much a moving target, but it's interesting to think about.
The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems. Not that it shouldn't be done, but wow.
The non-prestige dialects of a language don't usually attract official interest, not least because officially the people who understand that dialect could also understand a prestige variant. Scousers may not talk like King Charles among themselves, but if he speaks they're not confused about what the King is saying even if they wouldn't use those words or say them that way.
This might get sketchier for Chinese topolects where the official government policy is that China has a single language, "Standard Chinese" but, those topolects sure do seem like different languages if you didn't know about the policy. However AAV is nowhere close to that, I can't imagine that anybody who uses AAV normally watches "Last Week Tonight" and goes "That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?".
This means that AAV is culturally important, but there's not necessarily the same sense of "this is a separate language" that there is with Scots, even though in many ways it has all the same claims of being one.
It would be exceedingly difficult to strongly distinguish it from "Gen Whatever Slang" or "US Slang" or a lot of "LGTBQ Slang" etc etc. The list goes on.
Linguists would tell you that Scots is a sibling to English rather than just a dialect of English, having both descended from Middle English and that the dialect of English people in Scotland speak is instead "Scottish English". In practice of course humans don't language tag their speech (indeed they rarely even language tag written text) so it's murky. Maybe one word in ten that a Scottish bloke just said to confuse a tourist was technically Scots not Scottish English and perhaps some of it was even Gaelic. The important thing was that they confused the tourist as desired, for which frankly even an inside joke would work.
Sociolects are fun. In one of my friend circles the word "fish" is understood to mean the controller for a video game, I don't know why exactly, but if you said to one of us "Pass the fish" they'd hand you a controller without even seeming puzzled, that's just obviously what you'd call it. But in another circle it means nothing and you'd be greeted with confusion.
>That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?
Interestingly enough, I remember reading somewhere that you could be legally entitled to an interpreter in a court setting (take that with a grain of salt, I forget where I read it)
That is how it often manifests, the bits the Brits get to choose is in their own language and spelling.
The other thing I find interesting is that formal English has eschewed the double negative as an intensifier while most (all?) other Indo-European languages employ it. Compare Spanish “No veo nadie” (literally ”I don’t see nobody“ which is the informal English formulation) to English “I don’t see anybody.”
It was never shown in NI, which had its own Milk Marketing Board. Scotland had a separate one too, so probably didn't get them either.
Hahaha
I decided to have a bit of fun with the Accept-Lang header, if you're british it shows a totally different version of my blog including changing my name to a more british variant, a background including tea, phone booths, kings guards, busses, bulldogs and flags... and the colour scheme changes to RWB.
https://blog.dijit.sh
The original plan was actually to write two variants of every blog post, one where I write using dry wit, banter and colloquialisms, and the other with a more to the point and professional tone.
The reason I chose not to was because I thought it might be confusing when discussing the content on link aggregators (like HN)- I'm not so arrogant as to believe I write anything worth discussing, but it would violate the principle of least surprise... so I chose not to do it.
I'm curious to hear other peoples opinions, since this is the exact right subject to ask the question to relevant crowd..
I found it completely unrelatable and couldn't follow it at all, not having any frame of reference for how much a dollar might be worth in real money
Luckily the background reminded me i could go and make myself a cup of tea to feel better
now we're all confused.
This is definitely manageable: canonical meta tags and other metadata; update the URL to a canonical permalink that encodes the language preference; a banner that informs people that there is an alternate version, etc.
> BBC News Pidgin now dey on Whatsapp
> No dull yoursef, be di first to get latest tori, analysis, exclusive interviews and ogbonge coverage of Nigerian and International news from BBC News Pidgin, straight to your Whatsapp.
> Click here to join di channel
— https://www.bbc.com/pidgin
IMO if these are all the same language then they should perhaps be dignified with a proper name that doesn't involve the generic term "pidgin".
waldeinsamkeit, saudade, ya’aburnee, etc.
(I am not Welsh, but it has been described to me as an ever tightening elastic emotional rope that is anchored in a place and time that it might not be possible to go back to)
In Spanish for example, consuegro and consuegra refer to the father and mother of your child's spouse.
The Spanish words succinctly encode that relationship while English requires verbally traversing the family tree.
You could postulate that a language developed specific words for family and relatives because they prized those specific family structures? Or that language copied another language that did.
Similarly, you can categorise languages by how they group numbers, e.g. French is vigesimal while English is decimal.
Here's another: "fíjese". It kind of means "you'd never guess what happened". It's like "something that was completely unpredictable and totally outside my control happened, and it negatively affected my ability to do what I was trying to do", except with a lot fewer syllables.
Here's one going the other way: I was talking to a systems engineer about a specific issue, and I said that "we might be able to sweep that under someone else's rug". He was from Russia, and didn't have "sweeping it under the rug" as an idiom, and so didn't know what sweeping it under someone else's rug might mean.
Now, none of these are things that you can't say in another language or culture. You can. They're just a lot more unwieldy to say, and so people express that idea a lot less frequently.
As a Brit I am biased, however, there is a crucial difference between 'free range' British English and 'simplified' American English. Superficially, American English seems the more 'free', with liberties taken to create cool words and brand names. However, American English is constrained by the work of Webster, with their being a definitive dictionary, very much cast in stone, with changes such as 'no u in colour' made purely because of a rejection of everything English, including tea and spellings.
Currently we have something more extreme going on with the language that Ukrainians are expected to speak, with their 'government' seeking new and improved ways to move the language away from Russian. If this was OG English then it would be like getting rid of every French sounding word, so 'beef' becomes 'cow meat', 'mutton' becomes 'sheep meat' and so on. These changes can be made quite easily since it is not a whole new language has to be learned (or unlearned) at once. The lists of banned/allowed words changes all the time, much like Newspeak in 1984.
This won't be the last attempt to determine what a language is by decree, however, the result of such efforts is that languages get stuck in time. Hence the observations of my translation 'helpers', preferring English to their mother tongues.
Hence American English is British English, stuck in time for 250 years, or whenever Webster got his special dictionary to schools. Meanwhile, OG British English has evolved in its own way, a form of direct democracy, where words change based on how they are used in the here and now.
I don't believe there is such a thing as an actual English word, all of it is 'stolen' from various colonial adventures of the past, or inherited from invaders of the past, notably the 'old enemy', as in the French.
French used to be the language for arts, diplomacy and the aristocracy. But they lost out, in part due to the fixed dictionary. Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was.
Currently there is an existential threat to English as the language for science and technology due to the rise of China. It gets worrying when data sheets for Texas Instruments components are released first in Chinese, to be followed up, months later with English translations. Hence I am rooting for en-GB rather than en-US, due to that minor detail of there not being a 'Webster' dictionary of the past, casting a shadow on our future.
The Académie française has exactly 0 to do with the fact that French is used less as a lingua franca.
> From the outside
You should try visiting the inside.
Their attempts to claim culture is governed by strong borders is also hilarious when an hour's drive in any direction from London would expose them to people they probably wouldn't even realise are speaking English.
I've always wondered why people who so proudly claim to not be from here speak with such authority about how it is to live here.
It's Fox news claimed no-go zones and Sharia law cities all over again. Utter bullshit.
From outside this dimension maybe.
Fuck off.
Yours etc,
But that's more of a thing for millennials, I would've thought younger generations get exposed to more diverse cultures / languages / etc.
Anyway, for British-English full of cultural references, watch some of these compilations https://www.youtube.com/@OneGazillionEccentricGoldfish, Scouse is nearly incomprehensible (to my ESL ears). For difficult US-English full of cultural references, watch The Wire or Treme. Try both without subtitles.
I can understand The Wire fine without subtitles because most of the actors just speak relatively generic African American English instead of a proper Baltimore dialect, and that's no problem at all for someone who spent their formative years consuming Nas and Biggie and all the rest of it.
On the other hand Snoop who is the only main character with an actual Baltimore street accent is pretty much unintelligible to me, but I suspect she would be for a lot of middle class americans as well
I am glad someone is pushing back on this, though, and I want more multi lingual sites on the Internet in general.
My guess is US English, not UK English, not Indian English, not Chinese English. Sure, they may visit some of those sites, but I suspect that the most frequent will be US English.
There is no such thing as Chinese English, unless you politely mean "English as incorrect spoken by Chinese native speakers."
Look at the places where US english has become the norm or convention; programming, media, apps, business, Internet in general.
And the US is in unique position - it drives technology forward quite a bit, and it's also actual native English speakers.
So in other words got more to do with technological and economic influence, not population size.
Timer set for “thirdy minnids”. Unfortunately the others also sound like parodies in their own way — the Californian's idea of en_GB, “Oi, you go' a loicense for that thir'y minute timah?”
I would love to be able to write in proper narfuck, and have which ever screen reader read it out in the authentic accent for that area (central norfolk, not norwich, broadlands or the wierdos in the fens.)
There is something deeply joyful (to me) about a thick regional accent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc
Right?
PS - it's knickers
It's both surprising and irritating how many US-centric things are just assumed. (Don't even get me started on paper sizes...! ;) )
Europe uses the algo according to the ISO 8601 standard, where the week no.1 is the one with January 1st occuring between Monday and Thursday, inclusive. If the 1st happens on Friday or later within a week, it's considered a week no.52 or 53 of the previous year.
US does not use this scheme and (I guess) is numbering week no.1 when January the 1st occurs whenever within that week.
Some companies use week numbers in business talks, planning and scheduling, so be aware who is speaking about which weeks!
I've had the pleasure of working with many different people from different backgrounds, including many Brits. I've always found the dry, understated humor from them to be endearing, making casual conversation more interesting. My parents are both from the Middle East, my wife is from Southeast Asia, and I have many Middle Eastern, Desi, African American as well as African (as in continental) friends, so I may not be a "typical" American in that regard.
That being said, don't underestimate the value you bring by sharing your cultural insights. I don't think I told anyone to their face that appreciated their cultural value, but I hoped that my engagement and cheerfulness in dealing with them at least communicated that I was happy with their presence.
It might be that your engagement with someone opens them up to a part of the world they've yet to experience or know much about. Granted, there are lots of places with more gaps than the US and the UK, but there's still value in that and I started with those examples but mentioned it comes from all sides.
There's nothing unique about this though, it's the same for every language - it's one thing knowing Spanish well enough to hold a conversation where the other person is speaking slowly and making it easy for you, it's quite another to be able to slot into a group of native Chilean Spanish speakers in full flow
(IE; I never use the word "chip" to mean crisps or fries - I will instead use "Crisps", despite it being british, and fries, despite it being American; in order to avoid ambiguity.)
The more difficult one is "pants", I would say underwear or trousers.
It's interesting how I only notice how much it's contrasted when I go back to the UK and hear others, I notice people using words that I've put a mental "X" on, and its only then that I realise that I've put the mental "X" on the word... because it no longer feels natural to hear it.
In Australia we don't care about ambiguity or clarity and refer to both the thin sliced cold things and freshly fried rectangular ones as "chips"
Another is 'on accident'.
To avoid ambiguity, I always say "half past" in English so that Germans (and I!) remember to compensate for the language barrier. Unfortunately "half to" isn't really a thing in German, so I can't do the opposite when I'm speaking German.
It's more complicated than this and how you say "quarter to eleven" is A Whole Thing in Germany, but everyone agrees on the half hour at least
—He keeps talking about the war.
—Well you started it.
—No we didn’t.
—Yes, you did. You invaded Poland!
For example, I never said "supposed to" again — "meant to" has always sounded and felt so much better. Similarly, "can't be bothered/asked" often exactly describes the situation in a way that "I don't want to" seemingly can't.
I'd also like to add "bum bag" v. "fanny pack" was a valuable lesson and a memorable laugh.
What you heard wasn't what they were saying.
Aussie translation: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/can%27t_be_fucked
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_American_Speech
Despite all the woke stuff I still have to hide my en-GB background in my BigCo
I think it was less as a conscious act and more as a result of just not being around people that use them. There's a sizeable element of cultural reinforcement involved.
That said, they'll pry my British spelling out of my cold, dead, hands.
Oh, fer feck’s s sake, it’s not like the U.S. hasn’t had Monty Python for fifty years. Me, after a steady diet of British motorcycle magazine’s for the last 40 years, I speak Brit just fine. But I would think the diversity and prevalence of online forums would get folks up to speed. I dunno, maybe people just don’t pay that much attention.
OTOH, I do recall an Australia coworker who expressed appreciation that he didn’t have to explain idioms to me (Oz has moto mags, too). Obviously it’s a real problem even in this age of connections.
Funny story, I was visiting Hong Kong one time, and asked the young waiter, who seemed to speak English just fine, where the washroom was. Blank stare. Bathroom? Cesuo (Mandarin)? All blank stares. I was a little out of options at that point... Turned out the word I was looking for was "toilet", which is a word I never use.
Excuse me, but I believe you meant to say this bloug is written in en-GB.
More seriously... you know, 30 or 40 years ago, I can sort of understand this attitude. Today, in the amount of time it takes you to complain, you could have popped the word into Google or something instead and learned what it was instead. Probably in less than the amount of time it took you to complain for an online blog. And you might learn something interesting.
When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a thing called the "generation gap". It originally referred to something closer to the difference between the Hippies and their Greatest Generation parents, but it was smoothly repurposed into the differences between GenX and the Boomers, and the way we could have slang that was not decodeable by our parents.
I haven't heard the term in a while. The "generation gap" isn't what it used to be and there is less need for a term for it. I'm not entirely certain but I probably heard about "6-7" before my kids did. Urban Dictionary may not be the most reliable source in an academic sense but you can get a very fast sense of what something means from its entries, especially if you read them with a postmodern analysis eye and not just for the plain text.
I also find it a bit weird when people my age or the boomer generation complain about the kid's slang, because it's so easy to decode. You can't possible have a national-level kid's slang without an internet explainer 15 seconds away. It's not that hard anymore.
Try reading in light of basic facts, if you need more hint consider if a spell checker might put a wiggly underline under the letters "loug".
The term "log" as a list of entries in some kind of journal predates the internet in en-GB by several hundred years, having strong nautical origins on the ship's log. It is the origin of "login" too (entering entries into the log), or do you assert that it should be "lougin" too?
It was not, and never has been, "loug" in en-GB.
* blogue
I've traveled all over the world, and the one place that I've had the most difficulty understanding, was London. Cockney is hard. It's not just the patois. It's the cultural references and slang.
[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm
This comment is written in en-GB-Brummie.
Would en-GB-WLL be a valid variant of English?
It surprises me that anyone would feel entitled to ask a blogger to change the variety of English they use. American English is only one of many forms of English. The world is richer for its many varieties of English, and languages, and that diversity makes it more interesting, not less.
It requires an open mind to see diverse experiences as a good thing, and certain cultures think having citizens with open minds is an unprofitable way to run a society.
Also I see the Islamic movement in recent years pushing for Islamic homogeneous countries and driving ethnic, religious, language and sexual minorities out of their homelands (mainly into Europe).
Compare to today (often secular) European counterparts Arabic nations are homogenous and root cause was Anti enlightenment ideologies.
The seeds were planted during the enlightenment period but I believe the raise of nationalism is generally considered post-enlightenment
More precisely the Peace of Westphalia, which was a deal between the crowned heads of Europe to stop rocking the boat, and the absolute opposite of what the Enlightenment wanted since it was designed to consolidate royal political control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia
After that, the next big wave was the revolutions of 1848, which were inspired by national romanticism, but it’s valid to see that as an evolution of ideas that first arose in the Enlightenment. It certainly wasn’t out of any belief in royal absolutism.
> Yes—some countries have (at various times, and in some cases still today) adopted policies aimed at making the population more “homogeneous,” through segregation, assimilation pressure, or exclusion/deportation. Concrete examples:
- South Africa (apartheid era, 1948–1990s): An official system of racial classification and enforced separation (“separate development”).
- Germany (Nazi period, 1933–1945): State ideology enforced a racial hierarchy and pursued forced removal and mass murder of those deemed “undesirable.”
- Israel (state policies affecting Palestinian citizens and occupied territory, especially since 1967): Includes laws and administrative practices that many observers describe as producing or enforcing unequal status by group; key issues include citizenship status differences and restrictions tied to national/ethnic identity.
- Myanmar (Rohingya): Policies and law enforcement that stripped/blocked citizenship for Rohingya and enabled persecution, culminating in mass violence and displacement.
- Canada (Indigenous assimilation policy, especially 19th–20th century into 1996): Forced assimilation via residential schools and bans on language/cultural practices; many have characterized this as cultural genocide.
- United States (Jim Crow + earlier immigration/citizenship rules; and internment): Historical legal regimes created segregation and restricted citizenship/naturalization based on race/national origin (e.g., earlier Asian-exclusion immigration restrictions).
You may disagree with some examples on this list, but I'm sure even you would consider that the first two are clear examples of diversity-fearing 'cultures' rather than 'bait'. And this is even before considering the wider definition of the word 'culture', which can be even more exclusionary.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I, the human, demonstrated that even an LLM, which in this context can be viewed as an impartial source, could easily find legit examples.
I could of course have simply stated that this is the case without pasting the LLM text, but in that case I'm fairly sure OP could have simply replied "Nah-uh".
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/mandarin-...
Around the turn of the millennium, Muslim Uighur radicals got a lot of attention in the international press. But what most of the world had not followed was that before that, there had been conflict between secular Uighur Communists and the central government because the former saw the space for use of Uighur shrinking. Those Uighurs were silenced or forced into exile abroad, leaving only Islam as a channel for ethnic discontent.
Put it in quotes: "Indian Standard English" and you will see plenty of results.
https://www.google.com/?q=%22Indian+Standard+English%22
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/eww.24...
It doesn't mean a written standard exists.
Maybe it's called Standard Indian English or just Indian English in other contexts; I'm only using a term I've seen used.
(OTOH I don't think you should suppress 'false friends' like biscuits, pants etc.)
Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot
I expect the US meaning will eventually become standard everywhere.
I think almost all of the expressions in the left-hand side have direct, almost literal equivalents in French for example, with the same meaning as they have for the British, including being very context-dependent.
Also works for Flemish by the way, although the Dutch are supposed to be more literal so maybe Flemish/Dutch is to be seen the same way as British/American.
I use it in different senses all the time.
But the thing is that every one (at least those below a certain age) speaks like this these days, thanks to the non-stop American content online. So it's basically normalized. This is why it's on my publish wish list that someone develops an AI that can filter out the American-ness, thereby Making English Great Again (MEGA).
Further, I think that institutions (those pertaining to education, at least) elsewhere in the world should issue PSA about too much exposure to American content--both written and spoken--and offer or mandate detox sessions.
Perhaps the only American to whom (there it is!) I can bear listening, is Steven Pinker.
and the british have: obviously, innit, fam, right, know what I mean, etc
It's a trade-off: you can write in your regional dialect or you can write in a more widely understood global style.
Every now and then, France has officially doubled down on the latter — attempting to avoid Britishisms and now more generally Americanisms from official language. There used to be a measure of sympathy for this from us Brits — we can certainly understand why it feels frustrating to have Americanisms in our language — but I think the British perspective has shifted a little.
And if it doesn't, it should. We Brits should shut the fuck up about our (actually anachronistic, ahistorical) belief that contemporary Brits speak the One True English, because (especially post-Brexit) the fact that the world speaks any form of English is one big thing we have going for us when it comes to global trade.
English was a gift to us, arguably, from its forbears, and it is now perhaps our least divisive gift to the world. We speak our version of it and we should be proud of it. But we should equally be proud of its amazing diversity in the world.
FWIW my view on this used to be the old-fashioned one, until in the early 1990s I had a wonderful, hilarious, charming Indian professor at uni, and got to understand how beautifully English changed in India. ISE is often rather witty and poetic. Later in the 90s I read The God Of Small Things and it really crystallised — English is far too important for us to fuss about.
Nobody speaks the One True English. That is its power.
It doesn't really matter if you natively speak British English instead of American English, whereas French and English are obviously completely different languages and the switch made French a lot less useful and English a lot more useful
>When The Wicked Witch of the TERFs
Don't associate that cordyceps with Elphaba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling
Regarding Rowling: It seems to me that she gets more pushback/hate being, say "50% modern left-ish" than people that are even less aligned with left values. This gives me kinda medieval religion vibes (better an unbeliever/outsider than an apostate). I think such a valuation system is inherently flawed. Curious about your view on this.
Sidenote: If you're refering to the zombie-ant fungus, those go by Ophiocordyceps nowadays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis).
>Sidenote: If you're referring to the zombie-ant fungus, those go by Ophiocordyceps nowadays
Neat. I should probably explain why I called her that. She started noticeably becoming more unhinged a bit after she posted a picture of herself in a house that very clearly had a mould problem. Thus, as a way of coping, we (as in, the subset of the trans community I partake in) started joking that her views were caused by the mould
It just seems to me that often people that are politically still "somewhat close" (Rowling) catch more flak than politicians that associate "transgender" with something inbetween "subhuman" and "delusional", but don't talk about it too much (because their whole electorate coulnd't care less about the topic anyway).
I had a similar impression with political fragmentation on the non-Trump side in the last US election.
But maybe the behavior is even net-beneficial in some cases, and you gain more as a movement by pushing against a Rowling instead of a Farage.
My own somewhat cynical take is basically the Planck-principle: Actual progress mostly happens one grave at a time...
I still think from a political effectiveness point-of-view, pushing against Rowling is almost completely futile, because she has no electorate to satisfy and her view (from what I understand, her focus is on "protecting" cisgender women/their spaces from maliciously misdeclared transgender women?) is strawmanny, but difficult to just dismiss/pick apart.
But I can see now how perceived "betrayal" and actual public engagement with personal issues would elicit a much stronger response than an ideologically even more distant politician that just hates you quietly. Thanks for the discussion!
What I mean about political influence is limited to the UK. While it's mostly futile, a lot of us grew up with her works and don't want others to support her work through merchandise and stuff
Men with similar views to JKR receive far less vitriol.
Tell me, in what way am I a man? What danger do I pose?