My Disdain For American English © Niall Fleming 2005
I am completely failing to like the notion of American English, in short it rather annoys me. They stomp around with their cavalier attitude showing little regard for the needs and feelings of other people and countries, and worst of all, their own country was stolen in the first place.
They stole the English language, and bastardised it, to make it their own, which is fair enough, but don't expect me - an englishman - to use it. I was most unfortunate yesterday to run across an article which attempted to define the difference between an acronym e.g. 'BBC', and an abbreviation e.g. 'etc.' for 'et cetera', although what harrowed me more so was the fact that one of the commenters on the aforementioned article was attempting to purport that American English was Standard English, and that we should use the American definition. Needless to say I was completely outraged and shocked by this.
English is spoken/written/colloquiallised by English people in England where it was invented, last time I looked the USA was not called the United States of England, furthermore, I would say that the Americans have no right at all, to exercise their right as a superpower to make shoddy/dumbed-down American English the standard.
That's all it is, spelling for thick people, who can't simply remember that certain words which sound the same can be written differently, for example cheque and check, and that other words have a 'u' in them for a reason, it makes them pronounced the way they are, not the way they aren't, if I was changing the spelling of 'colour' to simplify it, I would not spell it 'color', because one would pronounce that 'coll-OR', I'd spell it 'colur', at least that would be closer.
However I doubt we could ever make them change now.
For the record:
- Acronym
- A word - not necessarily pronouncable (as the American Dictionaries would have it.) made up from the usually initial letters of a phrase e.g. IBM, International Business Machines, though occasionally letters from the middle of words may be used as well e.g. HTML, HyperText Markup Language. e.g. is also an acronym, of the Latin phrase 'exempli gratia' meaning 'for example'. (It should also be noted that all acronyms *are* abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms)
- Abbreviation
- A shortened form of a word or phrase, not including contractions. Examples of abbreviations include, etc. (et cetera), c. (circa), Mon. (Monday), Sgt. (Sergeant), abbr. (abbreviation!/abbreviated!), and Cwt. (hundredweight).
- Initialism
- This is a made-up word. An initialism would be an example of an acronym.
I think that covers most of my rage now, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you don't agree I'm sure you will use the webmaster[at]thisdomain email address to contact me. If you do agree also let me know.
P.S. - Post Script
The thisdomain part in the contact instruction must be replaced with the actual domain name of this website. Which although I know most of you would know, I just thought I'd best clarify.
I have received an email with regard to this article.