I like America. I like that just like us they have loads of different names for their country, USA, US of A, US, America and we have UK, Britain, British Isles, Blighty, whereas France is just France isn’t it?
I like their telly: I love Scrubs, Heroes, Sex and the City, America’s Next Top Model, Desperate Housewives, 24, ER, Gray’s Anatomy, Lost et al.
They have brilliant authors: James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, Janet Evanovich, Katherine Kerr, Harlan Coben, Andrew Gross et al.
They even have politicians that are more stupid or more sex mad than we do. Ours are boring, theirs are entertaining.
But recently, I have fallen out with them all…those Yanks!
I had a very nasty surprise the other day. Firefox wanted to update something or other and it also offered some dictionaries. These dictionaries come in different languages - obviously, because the tinterweb is global now you know.
As well as Spanish, French, Swahili etc they also offered:
- English
- English (Australian)
- English (British)
- English (Canadian)
What? WHAT!?
English OR English (British)????????????
There is obviously a gross mistake here. It should clearly be:
- English
- English (American)
Now listen up all you American cousins. We’ve let you borrow our language, and we’ve laughed at your spellings (what have you got against the letter ‘u’ anyway?) and it’s sort of cute that you call jam jelly and jelly jello (and if biscuits are cookies, what are cookies) and are overly fond of the letter ‘z’ and call it ‘zee’ and we find it hysterical that you call bums fannies, when we all know what fannies really are.
BUT
You have got our Ozzy Osbourne, you have got our Posh and Becks, you have even got our Fergie…and now you are trying to say that English isn’t British!!!
Give us back our language and we promise we’ll take Posh and Becks back…we’ll even take Fergie for the laughs.
Deal?
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One minor annoyance of my last job, in LONDON (and not London, Mississippi or whatever), was that the software we used was angled towards American spelling, and, when using the term “legal adviser” in correspondence, we were advised to spell the second word “advisor”, which I believe is American. And I didn’t.
It pisses me off when films (not movies) have location titles on them so that the viewer knows where the scene is. Titles like ‘London, England’ or ‘Paris, France’. It’s only the Americans who think that London or Paris could possibly be anywhere else.
I’ve also noticed that more and more Brits are using American spellings because of Microsoft. Organization instead of organisation for example. Despite my downloading of the correct English dictionary Firefox has still underlined the English spelling and no the American one!…but hah! they have underlined Firefox too so just shows they don’t know what they are doing.
There’s also “Athens, Greece”, to avoid any possible confusion with Athens, Georgia - although the latter, I believe, does boast a full-scale reproduction of the Parthenon. (And that’s Georgia in the U.S.A., of course, not in the Caucasus.)