The age of video sharing only highlights the way the USA has corrupted the English language, one of my pet hates is how 'solder' is officially pronounced in the USA as 'sodder' but they still say 'welder' as welder and not 'wedder' as I would have expected.
There must be a 100 of these quirks but every time I hear a USA Ham say 'sodder' I cringe and they go down one step in my estimation of intelligence.
I do not want to steal other peoples thunder by do you have others to add to this list?
Every second word in the American Lexicon?
My pet hate is the replacing of s with z and dropping the u out of proper words like colour and hundreds of others.
The problem with spelling in English is that it is not phonetic as it is in many other languages. In these languages saying written text is straight forward as what you see is what you say. Not so in English.
When Webster in the US compiled his dictionary he brought the spelling to align with the phonetics. Hence the difference between the Oxford and Webster dictionaries of the time.
A classic example of how English spelling can be out of touch with the spoken is "quay". Webster spelt it as "key" as spoken. To me this is somewhat logical.
Igor VK6ZFG
And of course there is the famous bouy pronounced "booeey".
Nev
Whisch is the shortest route to get to the PC shop that sells routers.
The other oddity is that quite a lot of what we call americanisms are how we used to pronounce words in the 17th centurey - they have become frozen in american english.
Or the different words :-
Faucet - tap
Receptacle - socket
etc
:-)
Some people dislike gotten, but it is an Elizabethan word, so it is real English.
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" - bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez - tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iears ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Utilising the Mark Twain/OZ2M arrangement, we might not even have to wait 20 years until the "sentence" is barely readable - it is already here...
It is commonly called TXT-ing (or SMS-ing) !
(particularly with auto-correct ON - or is that auto-suggest, auto-corrupt ?? )
It's even more fun watching them grapple with the metric system!