"Burgle" and your other favorite British inferiorities

Pillory, you mean?

 

If you ever used the term tomato sauce instead of ketchup for ketchup, I have bad news for you ... or so you would get told by any italian.

Also for the sake of math, millard (old BE)=billion (AE)

 

Yeah, we had to adopt the American Billion because the Amerifags can't handle divisions greater than 1000. Kind of illogical.

 

I refuse to accept it, nor will I ever write "sulfur" or say "aluminum."

Billion = 1,000,000,000,000
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

It's a million to the power of [prefix].

 

Brits have their own name for aluminum? I though only poles were hipsters like that. Whats the S's name then?

 

Sulphur and aluminium.

 

Aluminium is the right and only way, you silly 'mericans.

 

Tomato sauce is what you put in pasta, Ketchup is what you put on burgers and french fries, please die britfags for getting that wrong. Also al you minn ee um sounds retarded.

 

Al-you-min-um sounds retarded. Say u as in "under". And with the extra I.

 

Actually it's pronounced al-oo-min-um.

 

It's "ium" like the other metal elements. Americans are the only one's that get this wrong.

As for ketchup, I don't know anyone who calls it tomato sauce; it'd maybe be tomato sauce it it weren't mainly sugar and vinegar.

Also, USA putting commas before "and" and "but" regardless of context, a vile habit that is seeping into Britain.

 

Get your shit right. It was originally called Aluminum by Humphrey Davy. By the way, Platinum much?

And that comma shit? There's a reason it's called an "Oxford Comma".

 

I actually say and write aluminium, but I write sulfur. I've always spelled "grey" that way, and sometimes I write favor/color/savor the British way. I occasionally write "waggon", and I also write "theatre" that way, but I don't do the same with "program" or "center".

Incidentally, does anyone in Britain still use "honest" as a verb meaning "to honor"?

Edit: Or "deserve" as meaning "to earn"?

Also I heard that some people in Britain use the word "physical" to mean sane, and the word "physic" to mean a medicine or to mean "to heal or cure".

 

Humphrey Davy called it alumium, not aluminum. Learn to read.

Lithium
Sodium
Potassium
Rubidium
Cesium
Francium
Beryllium
Magnesium
Calcium
Strontium
Barium
Radium
Aluminium
Gallium
Indium
Thallium
Scandium
Titanium
Vanadium
Chromium
Zirconium
Niobium
Molybdenium
Technetium
Ruthenium
Rhodium
Palladium
Cadmium
Hafnium
Rhenium
Osmium
Iridium
Actinium
Rutherfordium
Dubnium
Seaborgium
Bohrium
Hassium
Meitnerium
Darmstadtium
Cerium
Praseodymium
Neodymium
Promethium
Samarium
Europium
Gadolinium
Terbium
Dysprosium
Holmium
Erbium
Thulium
Ytterbium
Lutetium
Thorium
Protactinium
Uranium
Neptunium
Plutonium
Americium
Curium
Berkelium
Californium
Einsteinium
Fermium
Mendelevium
Nobelium
Lawrencium

Surely you mean the serial comma. That is context sensitive.

 

If you're telling me to learn to read, then you must be blind as fuck if you didn't catch that whole paragraph.

And all I did was show that there is a metal that doesn't end in -ium. Obviously there are metals that end in -ium.

The serial comma was originally created some Brits to be used regardless of context. This is all a simple Google search away.

And if you want to speak a language that doesn't evolve, there are far more of them. I think English is a beautiful language precisely because it is allowed to evolve. Fuck pedantry, language should be allowed to live and grow on its own.

 

"aluminum" is a simplification of a BE word like there are several ones in AE but unlike that one it doesn't make a big difference between spelling colour to color; spelling (or writing, for that matter) aluminium as "aluminum" is like spelling Helium Helum, you wouldn't do that either, or? ...

in german, french, dutch and british english it's aluminium, in spain, portugese and italian it's aluminio, in russian it's spelled alumini, there is not a single other language beside AE which removed/doesn't write the second "i", so candles, please stop with your ridiculous "platinum has no i aswell", that's so arbitrary you could leave all "i"s out of -ium endings and call it correct. Just because one guy called it aluminum and all the world started using the more classical sounding word aluminium, doesn't mean you can justify to write it just like you want, but it's kinda obvious this happened here, aluminum is easier to write and suddenly there's noone using aluminium anymore, surprise.

 

I'm not so sure that I would agree with this statement. Yes, "proper" English, if it were ever spoken, and insofar as "proper" English could be qualified, would be weird as fuck. You have common stuff like "terrible" and "awesome" meaning their derivative words, but then you have weird stuff like "physical" not meaning "corporeal" so much as it does meaning "that which is beneficial".

However, the evolution of language does cause "great works", again, insofar as "great works" can be qualified to be lost to time. In two hundred or so years, people will probably have to learn a new language to read Shakespeare; hell, he's nigh incomprehensible even today without a decent commentary. Yes, I would agree that if all language were spoken, it could evolve all it needed to and it wouldn't really matter, but as seminal ideas have been recorded throughout history in modern English, all efforts must be made to preserve the structure of our language lest we resort to translation *shudder*.

But then again, any language that is spoken will evolve in writing as well, so I suppose that it's no use to struggle against inexorability. Edmund Waller did say to carve in Latin or Greek, after all. It might also be a good idea to carve in Traditional Chinese, now that I think about it.

 

I'm more protesting that Space Oddity is claiming it to be an American thing, when in fact it was originally called Aluminum by the British fellow who discovered it and who was then criticized by some pedantist because Aluminum didn't sound "classical" enough. Which is exactly as arbitrary as saying that we should remove the "i"s because Platinum ends in -um and not -ium.

And those ideas will be translated and preserved. As opposed to life centuries ago, it is much clearer now that works must constantly be rewritten and reevaluated to preserve them. It is the evolution of language that makes Shakespeare what it was and what it is, being riddled with slang and euphemisms, such as a "nunnery" being a brothel and "nothing" being a vagina. His works were out of date not even a century after they were written, and by the standards of the time would essentially be little more than what a Fox animated cartoon is today.

Famous works can be translated into modern languages that formally resist change. English is not a language that resists change, it incorporates and evolves with it. If someone is writing in English with the intent that it'll still be fully legible decades and centuries out, then they're picking the wrong language for the job.

One of the defining traits of English is that it is a language that easily allows slang into the standard lexicon. Pedants that insist on all the formality and stand against the changes deny one of the most beautiful features of the language.

 

"Humphry Davy identified the existence of a metal base of alum, which he at first termed alumium."

k.

It's used in a context that would lead to ambiguity. As for the Oxford University Press, these are the same people that wear white bow ties. No one else just crams in commas everywhere.

Evolution =/= spelling things wrong.

No one but America calls it aluminum, it's an American thing.

 

Just to elaborate a little bit: I think evolution of a language is important too but, on the whole, what the USA does is not evolution.

Evolution to me is the introduction of new and useful words, rather than changing the spelling of a word for ease of use. English has evolved a lot (largely thanks to Bill Shakespeare) but it's also been corrupted a lot, most rules have more exceptions than examples.

tl;dr English is pretty shitty, don't make it worse.