"Burgle" and your other favorite British inferiorities

Making things easier to spell is useful. As you pointed out, it makes it easier to use.

 

Lady Liberty calls those steak fries:


But you're also describing a food that sometimes gets called potato wedges.


The first fries are definitely just steak fries (or sometimes just "fries") and not potato wedges, but the second & third picture could be both. It depends how they are served. The term "potato wedges" is used to describe the cheap, unhealthy frozen food (tater tots fill the same role) while "steak fries" are typically fresh, slightly more upscale fries that you would get in a sit-down restaurant. But we're talking about the same food.

As an interesting note, the image file names in the second and third pictures both refer to "steak fries," but I would probably call them potato wedges before I would call them steak fries.

Yeah, I think the apartment/flat, roommate/flatmate thing is well known. But I noticed that you used "upmarket" to describe an assumed (?) more expensive housing unit. I think I would've used the word "upscale." I've never heard "upmarket" before.

 

To me a flat is what you get in a block of flats, which is probably more what an american would call a project.

An apartment is, as trickster said, a more upmarket sort of place. Basically a small but pleasant house, arranged within a larger building.

Upmarket mean, as you would likely deduce, towards the upper end of the market. Upscale works the same way, being towards the upper end of the scale, upmarket refers specifically to products or services available for purchase.

 

If you're referring to Hamlet, the "Get thee to a nunnery" line or something like that is actually a matter of contention, as to whether Shakespeare deliberately was attempting to invoke the double meaning of "nunnery". The scene where Hamlet and Ophelia talk about "country matters" and stuff occur have a lot more clever puns than "nothing" referring to the genitalia, which incidentally is slang that FAR predates even Old English. You should have invoked instead the scene where Hamlet calls Polonius a "fishmonger", which uniquely in Elizabethan times meant a pimp.

Anyways, the word "nothing" has generally been a euphemism for genitalia throughout the ages, so I'm a bit disappointed that the only instance I can recall currently is the scene in the Odyssey when Odysseus first meets Nausicaa. The scene, extremely roughly translated literally iirc goes something like, "Odysseus broke off a branch from a leafy bush and covered nothing" (i.e. his genitalia). I suppose another instance of this would be "Much Ado about Nothing" (I am loath to use another example with Shakespeare, but oh well) in which Benedick and Beatrice are described as having a "merry war", which again puns off of the meaning of the word "merry" as being "sexually aroused" e.g. in Hamlet again, "You are merry, my lord" said by Ophelia to Hamlet in the same scene where he talks about country matters; seeing how "Much Ado about Nothing" is roughly akin to a romantic comedy (and I use that term very loosely), the connotation in that respect appears clear.

But that's beside the point. Meanings of words shifts as slang is incorporated in the vernacular, and I neither dispute nor resist that in particular. What I specifically said was something along the lines that "in 200 years, we would have to translate Shakespeare to understand him", in the sense that both the syntax and semantics of English would become so divorced from that of Elizabethan English that it could justly be deemed a new language. Sure, some words will carry over (such as the modern Greek and Attic Greek word for "victory" both being nike, albeit with a different accentuation) but syntax alone will change to the point where Shakespearean English will be made incomprehensible in those regards alone. It's only been about five hundred years, and already we've lost the accusative case of "you", for instance. We no longer conjugate verb endings the same way; "maketh" is become "make". And although I still observe this as late as Jane Austen, (and of course, Oppenheimer's quoting a translation of the Bhagavad Gita), nobody says "He is come" or "He is become" anymore (you're supposed to use "to be" as an axillary verb when dealing with stative or intransitive main verbs: i.e. "Joy to the world/ the Lord is come"). The point is, evolution of language makes language nigh incomprehensible ere long. You might argue for translation, but I'll address that point later.

You could have said that at the time of publication, Shakespeare's plays were akin to Fox Cartoons; that they were "pop culture" or "low-brow" if you will, and I wholeheartedly agree. I don't know anyone who would fain dispute that. What separates Shakespeare from Fox Cartoons, of course, is simply because of the broad importance he has shouldered as a cultural icon. Imagine reading Huxley without prior knowledge of Shakespeare; (no, not Brave New Word) Time Must have a Stop becomes much more difficult than it should. All authors after him are inspired by him, some way or another, and all readers of those authors thus read a little bit of Shakespeare whenever they open a book.

There is no such thing as a perfect translation, unless you're one of those types who say "the author is dead, etc.", in which case this becomes akin to trying to argue that murdering a baby is wrong to a hard-core moral relativist. Assuming that you place any value at all to authorial intention, you should admit that each translator simply translates things differently. When you read a translation, you read not the original work, but instead some interpretation of that work. Furthermore, I disagree with your assertion that languages translate into English well. Just a few examples: ancient Greek has a word "kairos" which is translated as "the right moment" or "the right time", but this was a word with huge cultural significance in ancient Greece. Ancient Greek also has little particles like "ge" and "de", which have no English translation and is translated as "indeed", respectively, but again, these could drastically change the connotation of a work back in Ancient Greece. Chinese has a word for "rice" that is "fan", and a word for "food" that is also "fan", so you can't translate anything into English that would pun off of those two words in Chinese. Don't even get me started on poetry; Dactylic Hexameter does not work very well in English, especially when you're trying to translate something that is already very difficult to comprehend even in its original language. The fact of the matter is that that which often needs must be translated is never read by the people whom said works are necessarily translated for. If someone is legitimately interested in literature, he or she will learn French, and suddenly, their English copy of Madame Bovary is pointless. If someone is legitimately interested in philosophy, he or she will learn Greek and Latin, and suddenly they don't need their English translations of Aristophanes or Vergil. The fact of the matter is that the majority of people who would actually take their own time to attempt to understand in depth (not just merely "read") and actually learn something from the classics are also the people who would be willing to take time to learn the languages themselves. For this reason--that translation is often extraneous--along with the reason that translation is never accurate do I base my belief that translation is an inadequate mechanism whereby we may hope to preserve work for posterity.

Don't get me wrong. Slang is great. But there's a reason past simply being pedantic that using slang in writing is bad. Slang represents "living words", and "living words" are inherently unstable and imprecise. It matters not, to me at least, whether my writing sounds informal or not, so long as I can communicate what I wish to with some degree of precision, and using words such as "cool" and "weird" simply broadcast too wide a range of meanings for my liking.

 

For fuck's sake Hexi.

Also, I generally associate "upscale" with size, rather than price.

Also, Potato wedges are very different to chips for us, I just can't quite work out how. But they're distinctly different.

 

cooool

 

People use the word upscale? I've never heard it.

Also: Calling scones (which are pronounced with the same end as "gone") "biscuit" has always confused me whilst they refer to all biscuits as "cookies"; the same how all sweets are "candy". Cookies and candy are awesome but they're specific things to me.

As for the fries/chips things, idgaf. Salt + pepper potato wedges are where it's at.

Is using "-ise" a US thing or just a retard thing?

 

Wedges are generally seasoned, and crispier. Chips are more golden brown.

 

I know they're different, I was pointing out that having chips or fries when you could be having tasty potato wedges is silly.

 

I'm converted to tyres. Formula 1 is always right.

Colour and Armour.

 

I'm not even going to try to read all that, and I'll side with Trickster on this one.

 

You could learn something from it

 

English was my worst subject in high school, too much reading and boring shit combined with excessive pedantry. If I want to go learn something, I'll crack open a math or physics textbook.

 

Moral of the story: Candles can't read.

 

I hated my native language lessons as well.
Believe me, I'd rather read all shakespear than some of this homebrew shit..

 

Don't read Shakespeare, it's shit.

Watch Shakespeare. Try to find the BBC play of Macbeth they did over Christmas. Its the exact script but it's set underground in bunkers during a fictional war AND IT STARS PATRICK STEWART.

Edit: Here it is. July 2012, I'm not sure where you can watch or download it.

 

They need to remove Shakespeare from the curriculum for teaching English in schools. It's over now, he's been dead for a couple hundred years, students should be reading more modern classics, such as The Count of Monte Cristo, which while it wasn't written by an Englishman, is 4000x better than anything Shakespeare wrote.

There's no such thing as proper English, that's why style guides exist, so your argument is irrelevant.

 

Last warning, Hexi. This is not an appropiate post for this forum. Next time it's a ban!

 

You suddenly became awesome.

Also, I did read Hexi's post, but there's not really a lot for me to comment on, because I'm staying out of this argument. Whilst my English is near perfect, Shitstorm (Space_Oddity) has generally helped me improve a few points over the last couple of years, so I tend to side with him on these matters.

 

Its not leviosa

but

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