This blog is written in en-GB(shkspr.mobi) |
This blog is written in en-GB(shkspr.mobi) |
Well, there's the counterpoint to the whole post. You don't know what Twinkies are.
It was the blandest, most solid chunk of cake with a flavourless blob of sugar in the middle.
Describe a chicken nugget next, I bet people hate those too.
(For the record, a proper Twinkie would be fluffy, not a solid chunk.)
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?”
Who are they?!
https://youtu.be/zPFrTBppRfw?si=BaHHYnP52UfWd6Fs
Ian Rush (referenced in the ad) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Rush
If the Green Bay Packers lose every game, I think they're just back next year anyway like nothing happened? If Manchester United lost every game they're relegated and cease to be in the Premier League, some team you've never heard of which won the EFL Championship become a Premier League team next season [subject to various extra rules they can probably meet] and Man U take their place in the EFL Championship.
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.
* blogue
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English
However, this blog uses a very readable font called “Atkinson Hyperlegible” and I had no problem reading it. If the color scheme bothers you, click on “eInk” in the theme switcher on the top.
Disclaimers: No relationship to the owner of this blog. No AI used in this posting; I have the em-dash (—) in my custom keyboard layout.
It's a trade-off: you can write in your regional dialect or you can write in a more widely understood global style.
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
Nobody speaks the One True English. That is its power.
Or has the situation improved? :)
I've never heard of this depite being from the UK. It seems to be some ad from 1989. Although I do remember many classic ads from the 1980's I don't recall this. Is it an English / Scottish thing ? Who knows.
Why is Accrington Stanley so famous?
Ian Rush reflects on famous milk advert ahead of Liverpool v ... Accrington Stanley achieved worldwide fame primarily due to a legendary 1989 television advert for the Milk Marketing Board. In the iconic commercial, two young Liverpool fans debate whether to drink milk. One claims that football star Ian Rush told him, "If you don't drink lots of milk, you'll only be good enough to play for Accrington Stanley". The other boy questions, "Accrington Stanley? Who are they?", prompting the reply, "Exactly". The slogan became a massive pop-culture catchphrase in the UK, turning a then-obscure non-league team into the most famous minnows in football.
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.
> From the outside
You should try visiting the inside.
More generally, we Brits draw a measure of distinction between cultural pride and nationalism: the former is good, and we have plenty of it; the latter is viewed with suspicion, for good reason.
(Edited for clarity)
From outside this dimension maybe.
Fuck off.
Yours etc,
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".
It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe, the start of the week is on Monday (vs Sunday in the US), the default paper size is A4 (vs US letter), measurement defaults are metric (indeed UK roads use imperial, but the default is otherwise metric), the time format uses 24hrs (vs AM/PM in the US).
Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...
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.
> Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished.
(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".
This blog calls that out brilliantly.
Sometimes it's their turn to repay the favour
https://www.reddit.com/r/PawPatrol/comments/1q68v16/british_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PawPatrol/comments/17wcsdm/my_digit...
Perhaps you can be more inclusive in your language on the future.
Also, in the late 90's, The Register made me love British English... Local accents are great branding.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English (we don't have to take the examples in this page as-is, we can definitely make better local oddities!)
This comment is written in en-GB-Brummie.
Would en-GB-WLL be a valid variant of English?
“Do you remember that JK Rowling lady we all hate because she’s an evil witch? Haha, yeah. Anyways, I’m British and I’m going to keep writing like I’m British.”
Edit: I agree with the thesis. You have a culture; don’t filter it. Differences are beautiful. I’d rather live in a melting pot. Etc. Separately this new communication style is hard to stomach. Ive seen it growing in popularity in the U.S. - seems like there too?
Incidently I always change automatic language correction tools to English GB, I live in this side of the Atlantic, and that is variant I learnt while growing up.
- "proper English"
- metric system
- Euro
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.
That is how it often manifests, the bits the Brits get to choose is in their own language and spelling.
There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm and we should all adjust our language to fit their definitions and culture. I intend to keep eating faggots, having a master branch in git, etc.
I am glad someone is pushing back on this, though, and I want more multi lingual sites on the Internet in general.
You just mean that you visit more american sites than other non-US english speaking sites
But there are some interesting issues with UK <> US english, things like 'quite' which works in different ways in each locale. I was also very surprised to discover the difference in what we consider a frown - which makes a lot more sense of the US 'turn that frown upside down'. Interestingly my uncle who'd lived in the US ~20 years had never uncovered that difference till I asked him about it.
So it's good to know differences - especially when you want communication to be clear.
British "quite" means somewhat.
American "quite" means very.
A Brit saying a suggestion is "quite good" is actually saying it's not good enough, whereas a US listener will think they've been told the opposite.
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!
>When The Wicked Witch of the TERFs
Don't associate that cordyceps with Elphaba
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 referring to the zombie-ant fungus, those go by Ophiocordyceps nowadays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis).
I remember a naive cultural bias in the US towards regarding the English as possessing an elevated degree of education and refinement. I would have assumed the greater presence of truly idiotic British figures in American news media and comedy in recent decades might have clubbed that misconception to death like a baby seal.
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
The answer is definitely still a big no, but for me the reasoning is because it will make it worse. And you apparently aren't the target audience anyway, so why should I care if you stick around.
(Whereas in the case of harry potter, the goal was to sell books, not just to produce something good).
"Accrington Stanley!, Who are they?"
"Exaaaccttlyyy...."
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.
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.
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'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 tend to hang with … interesting … people.
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.
Just whatever you do, don't mention the taxes! I did once, but I think I got away with it...
—He keeps talking about the war.
—Well you started it.
—No we didn’t.
—Yes, you did. You invaded Poland!
(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.
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
People occasionally comment that it's a British word, but being misunderstood is so unusual I can't remember a recent example. Essentially everyone has read/watched Harry Potter, Dr Who or Midsomer Murders, and Europeans are probably ten times more likely to have visited the UK as the USA.
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 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'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.
> My parents are both from the Middle East, ... so I may not be a "typical" American in that regard.
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.
I travel a lot so I'm used to adapting my use of English depending on who I'm talking to. I find there's a way to express things and still enjoy using the language without making it hard for non-native speakers to understand. But also, when you do end up in a group of entirely Brits it is fun to be able to just let loose
Despite all the woke stuff I still have to hide my en-GB background in my BigCo
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.
waldeinsamkeit, saudade, ya’aburnee, etc.
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 there 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.
IMHO 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. Therefore 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.
> 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
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!”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.
This was a very noticeable phase in the UK; I knew several Dutch people who were fully unaware they had American accents and some American linguistic traits until they got here.
Whereas Dutch friends of my father who learned English before WWII had actually quite plummy English accents.
For context, I'm British though I have spent a fair amount of time in the states over the years and somehow never picked up this difference.
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.
> 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.
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?".
The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems. Not that it shouldn't be done, but wow.
Please tell me that's not a thing.
2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667
Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.
(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)
It's also the official spelling used by the United Nations.
British people say "I couldn't care less about the World Cup".
Both are saying they have no interest at all in the World Cup. I don't know why Americans phrase it that way.
To give a documented example, the lyrics of Teenagers by My Chemical Romance:
They said, "All teenagers scare the livin' shit out of me"
They could care less as long as someone'll bleedLook 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.
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 a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm
> having a master branch in git
4.3 Limited Use Nonce Values
The Digest scheme uses a server-specified nonce to seed the
generation of the request-digest value (as specified in section
3.2.2.1 above). As shown in the example nonce in section 3.2.1, the
server is free to construct the nonce such that it may only be used
from a particular client, for a particular resource, for a limited
period of time or number of uses, or any other restrictions. Doing
so strengthens the protection provided against, for example, replay
attacks (see 4.5). However, it should be noted that the method
chosen for generating and checking the nonce also has performance and
resource implications. For example, a server may choose to allow
each nonce value to be used only once by maintaining a record of
whether or not each recently issued nonce has been returned and
sending a next-nonce directive in the Authentication-Info header
field of every response. This protects against even an immediate
replay attack, but has a high cost checking nonce values, and perhaps
more important will cause authentication failures for any pipelined
requests (presumably returning a stale nonce indication). Similarly,
incorporating a request-specific element such as the Etag value for a
resource limits the use of the nonce to that version of the resource
and also defeats pipelining. Thus it may be useful to do so for
methods with side effects but have unacceptable performance for those
that do not.
Presumably the etymology was in place before it took on its present meaning, but it is not a word I would use in a professional context.
My comment was oblique, but not sarcastic. Partly because I didn't want to use the word directly, and partly in keeping with the tone of the original blog post!
This is now far more than an American assumption. I have seen younger continental Europeans bristle at UK English because they grew up in a world of social media that is converging on usage that is closer to US English.
Wait, isn't that a cigarette? Why would you eat it?
edit: nevermind, it's actually meatballs, the short version is for cigarettes