If PHP were British (addedbytes.com)

The problem is, some of the code had been cut and pasted and saved as text and Danish and Norwegian are very close so sometimes that would work, and sometimes it would seem to work but errors would lurk around every corner, and only occasionally would it fall flat on its face in obvious ways (if it'd been transferred from a different language version at least it'd been more likely to be obvious on reading through the code what needed to be modified..)

A common complaint I actually heard was about how you could tell that the computer was american because of how blunt and "rude" the error messages were and why weren't computer sold in Britain better mannered?

  would_you_mind {
  // Code here
  } i_cant_be_asked (Exception £e) {
  // Politely move on
  cheerio('Message');
  }

    would_you_mind {
        // Code here
    } im_afraid_so (Exception £e) {
        // Politely move on
        cheerio('Message');
    }

Really? That's how I've always spelt it.

Surely, that should be "good old chap", if P.G. Wodehouse taught us anything ;-)

I hope you used Nigel too!

Hey now, some of us resemble that remark.

Multiple middle names are good, especially if one of them is St. John. Now that I think about it, that's going to be my go-to first name. "How do you spell that?"

I'm not really how you could regard this article as pompus self-regarding wankery, but I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree.

1. there is opportunity for genuine discussion here (why can't I write my programs in my native tongue? is it an insurmountable problem to let me type 'colour' and for you to see 'color'?) but that opportunity is never taken up

2. It's wrong. If you're going to make a joke at least get it right - this isn't British English, this is "I looked up some random stuff online" English

3. It's not funny. It can be if done well but this post, like many others, takes a "throw everything I found at the wall and see what sticks" approach. Some of them are great - the switch/case statement is a genuine improvement, in my eyes. Some of them are just pompous wankery, as you so elegantly put it.

More over, its not like we Brits don't hold dear all the American stereotypes. IMHO, it would be nice with we Brits and Yanks could banter back and forth like we do with the Aussies. I mean, how boring would live be with out the Aussies ribbing us?

IMHO, there is something a bit too serious about the British relationship with the US, that doesn't exist with, say, the Aussies. Or, is it that the US is very serious with every one? While the US has some great comedians, there does seem to be a huge lack of a national sense of humour. Very serious country the US.

The idea is that the words originally came from ancient Greek, where they had the ending -ιζειν, pronounced with a z. The trouble with that is that not all these words did come from the Greek. E.g. realize/realise was (IIRC) a French invention, and they spelled it réaliser. And even in the ones that did come from the Greek, not all of them had the -ιζειν ending - e.g. analyse/analyze was ἀνα·λύω (pronounced analuo); I guess the French gave it the -yser ending.

(The real solution, IMO, is to reject the idea that the 'correct' spelling of a word is the one closer to how it was spelled in the language it was invented in).