You crazy yanks

'Scone' has always struck me as a really odd one, in that the different pronounciations don't seem to be regionally or class-based. I remember we used to argue about it at school, and it's not like we were a particularly diverse bunch. And often British usages that are still common in Britain. You'll often hear Brits (usually southerners) mocking Americans for calling trousers 'pants', but the entire north-west of England calls them 'pants' as well.It sometimes astonishes me that even now I occassionally come across differences between American and British English that I'd never seen before. Two that I only uncovered in recent years are words I assumed were common, but which provoked blank looks from Americans - fortnight (meaning 'two weeks') and teetotal (meaning 'abstinent from alcohol').Edited by caffeine, : punctuation

Where are you guys based? I take it you play in the UK?

Almost all my time in Europe (summers of 1973 and 1974) was spent in Germany, plus a few days in Belgium and France that I simply could not avoid (due to charter plane flight schedules). I never made it to the UK, so all of my exposure has been through film, TV, and radio.I can take most British pronounciation in stride and have even tended to adopt much of it from film. Except for their mis-renderings of Spanish, mi idioma tercero. National Public Radio here had in the past frequently used BBC sources. What I could never understand was why the Brits kept throwing extra syllables into such simple place names as Nicaragua. C'mon! Nicaragua. It's simple! How does that ever turn into Niceraguerera?And there's that strange tendency towards replacing a final -a with "-er". In our version of a British export, "Dancing with the Stars", the names of latin dances are horrifically "anglicized" (ie, rendered into "English" in no way a Southern Californian would). Such as "smber" for "samba" (phonetic clues: each 'a' is pronounced exactly the same, similar to "a" in "father").

"Fortnight" is only known in the US via Shakespeare. Do you mean that it's still currently used in the UK?And "teetotaler" for one who abstains from alcohol was still current when I was growing up (1950's through 1960's). Maybe the young kids haven't learned it yet.Of course, there are many terms I consider to be common (in Southern Calif.), though I have not had opportunity to test that assumption.

All the time It's especially common in the context of a holiday, e.g. a fortnight in Benidorm (*shudder*)

They aren't misrenderings, any more than pronouncing the terminal 's' in 'Paris' is. It's just the place names translated into English! And we pronounce it Nicaragyoo-a; but if you say it fast enough it sounds just like the Spanish.As for the samba, do you mean turning the final vowel into a schwa, rather than an 'er'? There's definitely no terminal 'r' - a lot of British accents don't even bother with them when they're supposed to be there. I generally pronounce 'a' 'e' 'er' and 'or' all as schwas when they're at the end of a word.

Well, I hate to be the exception, but...And the North-West is far more than just Wigan and Warrington

True - there's also the Wirral.

I bet they don't say pants in Wilmslow But talking of place names beginning with the letter W, have you ever noticed the exceedingly high number of desitnations within the South West Trains network that begin with the letter W?

Hi Larni,We are based in Leicester.Leicester doesn't have a dialect so much as a speech defect.Mutate and Survive

Briterican responds to me:

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I'm hesitant to disagree, as I completely understand where you are coming from (and because I admire your intellectual prowess hehe), but...

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Disorientate - definition of disorientate by The Free Dictionary

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Oh, I know it's in the dictionary. Been around for a while, too, but that's just because people keep using it as a word. And it makes sense why: So many other words that have "-ation" as the suffix when a noun will have "-ate" as the suffix when a verb ("complicate" -> "complication," "renovate" -> "renovation") so it's only natural that if the noun is "orientation," then the verb must be "orientate."Kinda like why so many people have trouble saying "nuclear," pronouncing it as "nu-kyuh-lar." So many other words have that "kyuh-lar" construction such as "muscular" and "vernacular," including an extremely related word, "molecular," that poor "nuclear" gets caught up in the habits...it's one of the few if not the only word in English that has the "klee-ar" pronunciation.But it isn't.And "task" isn't a transitive verb. I don't "task" you with an assignment. Instead, I "assign" you a task.I never said I was rational about this.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

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Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

Larni responds to me:

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So unless your coach is English I would take the advice as a crap shoot.

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She is, and I do know that there is variation in British pronunciation, but from what I can find, "skon" is the "preferred" pronunciation despite the fact that I can't recall anybody ever saying it that way the entire time I lived in the UK.But, since we're playing to an American audience, we're going with the pronunciation the Americans will understand. We don't need them wondering, "What on earth is a 'dropped skon' and why would you want a recipe for one?"

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

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Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

My experience of the South-West consists of a couple of holidays in Cornwall as a child and a conference in Bristol once, so I'll have to defer to your greater knowledge on this one.

Whereabouts were you based? I've always noticed myself in the minority with the long 'o'. The short o is also essential for the 'fastest cake in the world' joke.

I just wanted to say hasn't it been nice and quite on-line today while they've been sleeping off their big turkey dinners.