Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

Post by spydum » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 5:51 PM UTC

lemoncucumber wrote: post #133

voiceblue wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence is hinting on something that actually has more bearing on technology effecting language: HTML. When I was first learning HTML & CSS it irked me to have to spell "colour" wrong to get things working. Now I just use the US American spelling everywhere (it helps that I'm currently in the US).

That’s still not as bad as having to spell referrer wrong in http headers where it’s spelled “referer”... which is incorrect for every flavo(u)r of English.

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #109

sshine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s similarly comical how video-recorded board meetings will have grown-up people hold woke signs while others recite from library books with controversial wording, everyone starts shouting, and they get escorted off property for reading aloud the book (available to kids). It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity. Maybe it’s just as bad some places in Europe, and it just doesn’t get televised.

The actual substantive issues of racism and diversity have actually been brilliantly taken over by the ultra-rich and political powers that be. What's the real giveaway? Corporations LOVE talking about them. In the social media massively distributed bullhorn industry, these issues are used to create a distracting perma-debate that both parties can employ and divide for their needed political support. But notice that…

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

Kwpolska wrote: post #106

> While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance. > "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Wor…

Post by Tams80 » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #102

cubefox wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those points also apply to other European countries. Though regarding the quotation marks, that seems to be more the fault of the local keyboard layouts. I don't understand why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“. MS Word relies on a software solution to automatically convert "ord" into the German format, but most software (like browsers) understandably don't bother with implementing such rep…

>> Other than in English-speaking countries and some Spanish-speaking countries, the terms a.m. and p.m. are seldom used and often unknown. I did not know that. The terms are from the Latin ante meridiem and post meridiem (meridiem, midday, ante before, post after) so it seemed logical to me that any Romance language would have them. But then, English is not a Romance language (but borrowed heavily from them) so, cha…

Post by bananaflag » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #142

bananaflag wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My native language (and I imagine many others) didn't have any localized version of Word until the late 90s and I (and I imagine many others, even people who didn't speak English at all) got used to using English words like "Save", "Italic", "bullets" etc.

English incorporates words from other languages all the time. Large numbers of American Indian words, for example. When the US occupied Germany, a number of German words. And so on. Heck, half of English nouns are taken from French, from when the French conquered England.