Just to add some more controversy to this thread...why is it spelled centre? If you sound it out phonetically then it doesn't make the word we all pronounce. However, center does sound like the word we're all saying.
robwa10 wrote:Just to add some more controversy to this thread...why is it spelled centre? If you sound it out phonetically then it doesn't make the word we all pronounce. However, center does sound like the word we're all saying.
Isn't it a French word as in centre ville or centre commercial
Quite often Welsh speakers will steal English words like "blwdi" and "garej" in which case they get much more sensible phonetic spellings. "senta" is I think how it would be spelt.
Of course this would enrage Welsh Horizons as the correct word is canol, canolfan, calon, canolwr or craidd depending on which centre you mean.
In the '60's when parts of French society started getting quite exercised about English phrases creeping into French usage, Underzo and Goscini, who produced the Asterix cartoons, produced a series of cartoon strips in Latin with one or two French words complaining about how the language was being ruined...
That the language changes is self evident. Chaucer's English is not Shakespeare's and neither are the same as today's usage and spelling. Foreign influence plays its part in the way language changes and it will always be so. While I spell Theatre, Centre and colour to English way I'm not put off by the American spelling, so long as it is used by Left Ponders. Given that William Shakespeare appears to have spelt his name in a number of different ways I feel we can be a little relaxed about the while thing. To my mind the use of text speak spelling is far worse and sometimes the meaning is lost altogether.
"I thought of that while riding my bike." -Albert Einstein, on the Theory of Relativity
There is no logical reasoning that can win this argument. So in theory we shouldn't bother. Indeed, Stephen Fry doesn't mind Americanisms, so therefore it must be ok!
However, it is one of those irrational things that annoy me to some degree, although probably not as badly as bad grammar and punctuation.
My main gripes? People spelling "color" in a British magazine or newspaper is one. The other one I really can't stand is people who use "period", as in "This is the end of the argument. Period." It's a hackneyed phrase anyway, so using "full stop" isn't much better, but we're British, don't you know. The only saving grace is if you translate it in your head as "time of the month" then it becomes much funnier.
mark a. wrote:There is no logical reasoning that can win this argument. So in theory we shouldn't bother. Indeed, Stephen Fry doesn't mind Americanisms, so therefore it must be ok! .
I suspect that your comment is tongue in cheek and that like me you deplore that Fry is increasingly being cited as an arbiter of things correct vis a vis english language, literature and taste. He tweeted for god sake!
When a'were a lad - there were no (Japanese) tsunami's. Watching the events of the Chilean earthquakes last week the UK TV news reports were full of dire warnings of tsunami's hitting the coastlines of several countries. What did we have before tsunami's? Cyclones? Tidal waves? Storms? I don't know, perhaps it's a new environmental thing.
And in the 70's after the Rocky films came out, a new (to us) Mexican word came into everyday use - 'macho' . The same thing is happening to other countries throughout the world - only they're using the odd English (ie., American) word to describe something. On the basis of their growing economic strength, how long before Chinese words come in to common usage throughout the world - wok was that?