Back in the motherland, I used to know my grammar quite well. Having moved to the US, I have very quickly found myself unable to spell basic words, and quite often being completely misunderstood. Brace yourself, but you're in for an English lesson today.
The worst violation of English is the inexplicable and constant overuse of the letter Z. For starters, they call it 'zee' which is entirely unhelpful due mainly to the fact it's pronounced the same as C. When somebody spells something here with a C in it, sometimes if you substitute a Z, you'll probably find what you're actually looking for. Also, any words with the -ise suffix become -ize. I don't get it. But then there are words like compose, which are pronounced the same, but spelt with an S. I find myself constantly asking how to spell basic words. I probably look like a complete goose when I have to ask a Director how to spell a word like compose, but that comes with the territory. What's even worse is when your work comes back reviewed with basic spelling 'errors' that need fixing. Apparently there's something called US English. It's supposed to be a language, but it sounds like a cop-out to me.
There's worse to come. Americans, particularly in the south, abbreviate "you all" to y'all. It's roughly equivalent to the Australian "youse". The problem gets more complicated though. On a number of occasions, I've had the word y'all used when I'm the only one there. What do they mean by you all? There's only one of me, so who else are they talking about?
It gets even worse - brace yourself. The possessive form of y'all gets ugly. In the same way that you becomes your, y'all becomes y'all's. How on earth does a word actually come to have two apostrophes in it? One's a contraction, and the other's a possessive. Any 'language' that has a polyapostrophic word in it just doesn't qualify as a language as far as I'm concerned. The sooner they realise that, the sooner we can get rid of the letter Zee.
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8 comments:
In your last paragraph you spelled realiZe incorrectly :)
But seriously I know what you mean, I had to switch MS word and other such things over to the "US English" spell checking functions to work out what I was doing wrong.
Two apostrophes - Here's wishing you a couple of G'day's to you and Alicia.
Oh Mikey. We need to get you a hobby.
bwahahahaaa!! I'm still picking myself up off the floor. I have nothing funny nor clever to add. :(
Dr. Nick talks to the fire chief: 'Inflammable' means 'flammable'? What a country!
Realize is spelt 'realise' in British English (the better of the two). The interchanging of the s and z is, in fact, mentioned in this blog, genius.
MvdB - You can't have "G'day's" because you would be using the second apostrophe to denote a plural?
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