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Post by Verbivore on Feb 7, 2020 8:48:01 GMT
Plain planes? Studies on beef cows in the Great Planes of the US found […] (para. #7) AFAIK, the only geographical locale in the US with such a name is the Great Plains – nothing to do with Boeing. That brings to mind the bales / bails conundrum that I frequently encountered in real-estate adverts when I was newspaper subbing. Former dairy bails (milking sheds) are popular dwelling conversions here and are frequently misspelled as bales – as in hay bales. One milks cows in bails (bails them up) but feeds them bales of hay (baled dry fodder). I suppose one can land planes on plains, but never should the spellings be confused. And I certainly shouldn't like to bailed up in a jumbo jet with methane-belching cattle. |
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 8, 2020 14:34:22 GMT
Vv. You will be pleased to know that the solecism has now been corrected.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 8, 2020 14:40:10 GMT
Vv. You will be pleased to know that the solecism has now been corrected. Pleased indeed, LJH.  Of course, that will only encourage me to keep up my "emend, please" messages! |
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 8, 2020 14:52:46 GMT
Suppose I’d better tell Aunty Beeb about this one, too (para. $3): troop for troupe (something I see increasingly frequently). If spellcheckers were abolished perhaps people might be compelled to learn spelling again. More and more I encounter the wrong homophone across many media. PS: Aunty has now been told (again). I'm sure she (and her Oz sister) must tire of me and my pesky kind.  |
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 9, 2020 12:13:50 GMT
I think I've discovered a hitherto unrecognised link between earthquakes and deadly infections. Every time a newsreader or journalist on any UK TV channel mentions the most recent occurrence of the new coronavirus, they talk about its "epicentre".
A bit more work on this and I'll be demanding a Nobel prize.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 9, 2020 12:28:01 GMT
I think I've discovered a hitherto unrecognised link between earthquakes and deadly infections. Every time a newsreader or journalist on any UK TV channel mentions the most recent occurrence of the new coronavirus, they talk about its "epicentre". A bit more work on this and I'll be demanding a Nobel prize. Twod: It's had me grinding my hi-tech Swiss dentures! Epi-fornicating-centres abound in so many non-vulcanological contexts. I recently felt compelled to chide a YouTuber for misusing epicentre when plainly and unequivocally the word he needed was hypocentre (context Nagasaki / Hiroshima bombs detonations). It seems on most of its outings these days, epicentre is being used to emphasis how very central to something or somewhere a place is. But I don't buy it. |
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 13, 2020 9:35:57 GMT
A couple of pronunciation matters that have bugged me for ages:
1. contribute – CONtribute or conTRIBute? (OED gives the latter.)
2. controversy – CONtroversy or conTROVersy? (OED gives the former.)
3. (probably one for California Dave) Do any Americans use an before a word that starts with a vowel? All I hear when Americans speak on YouTube etc. is "a animal", "a oboe", "a inch", etc. (and that's uh animal not ay animal).
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Post by Dave Miller on Feb 13, 2020 13:29:02 GMT
On both of those words, I tend to follow the stress-the-pre-penultimate-syllable pattern which is common (though far from universal) in British English:
PHOtograph
PhoTOGraphy
PhotoGRAPHical, etc
So, for me it’s contROVersy (but controVERsial) and CONtribute (but contriBUtion). However, conTRIbute does not sound as odd to me as CONtroversy does.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 13, 2020 19:43:27 GMT
1. contribute – CONtribute or conTRIBute? (OED gives the latter.) I agree with OED
2. controversy – CONtroversy or conTROVersy? (OED gives the former.) I say the latter but I have always thought I was wrong!
I have never noticed an American dropping the ‘n’ before a vowel.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 13, 2020 20:40:47 GMT
Thank you, Dave and LJH.
Regarding the a/an matter: YouTube is by no means an arbiter of anything, but perhaps it does demonstrate some broad commonalities. I don't encounter American speech in many other media, so perhaps it's mainly YouTubers' style I'm hearing and they might not be broadly representative of American speech. It just strikes me as odd, and is very grating on my ear to hear "a egg", "a orange" … .
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 14, 2020 7:08:56 GMT
A friend who understands my obsession with a certain German car marque sent me this cartoon. And it's true.  Mer = mare / ce = tsuh (the Germans’ way of pronouncing the c in what is a Spanish name, though some eschew the t part, depending on their locational origins in Deutschland) / des = deez, accent on the Mer. And then there’s the e in Benz: just a short eh (though optionally the terminal z is sounded tz rather than plain z). Maretsuhdeez-Bentz.I'll shut up now. :-0 |
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 14, 2020 12:41:34 GMT
And the E in Benz is also different.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 14, 2020 20:17:38 GMT
And the E in Benz is also different. Some lark in a motor magazine once commented on the Benz-originated crumple zones: "See how the Mercedes bends". |
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 14, 2020 20:59:54 GMT
Does anyone know why it is that when I click on a topic in this forum, the “panel” changes colour and I have to click again? This is new. Is it an improvement?
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 14, 2020 21:07:13 GMT
Does anyone know why it is that when I click on a topic in this forum, the “panel” changes colour and I have to click again? This is new. Is it an improvement? LJH: I don't get that effect; have tried it in Safari (my default browser) as well as Firefox and Opera but all seems as previously. What browser are you using and on what platform (Windows, Mac OS, Linux …)? |
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