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This blog is written in en-GB

shkspr.mobi

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Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#281

Post by hdgvhicv »

kstenerud wrote: post #75
biofox wrote: post #28

I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use, and I've found myself significantly changing the language I use to a very utilitarian and direct style to prevent the endless blank stares... reading this blog post just made me realise that this self-editing has made my interactions rather more 'flat' and unnatural, as they now lack spontaneity, with everythi…

I have a cunning plan: Sneak as many Brits into Hollywood as possible, and have them slip in as many British references into American films as they can. Over time, they'll effectively BECOME British, and Robert's your father's brother! Just whatever you do, don't mention the taxes! I did once, but I think I got away with it...

I do wonder how many americas say “dayta” instead of “darta”, and “fewtile” rather than “fewtill” due to Patrick Stewart’s influence.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#282

Post by rkangel »

biofox wrote: post #28

I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use, and I've found myself significantly changing the language I use to a very utilitarian and direct style to prevent the endless blank stares... reading this blog post just made me realise that this self-editing has made my interactions rather more 'flat' and unnatural, as they now lack spontaneity, with everythi…

I worked in a US office for a while (but with a few other British people as well). I didn't feel the need to edit my sense of humour luckily, but I purposefully switched to saying things like "sidewalk", "elevator" and "bathroom" because it made interactions a lot easier.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#283

Post by bluebarbet »

Theodores wrote: post #152
egwor wrote: post #14

I think that by exploring how different cultures and languages communicate about things opens the mind. There are concepts that can't be easily/succinctly explained in English but can in other languages. I think that we should be encouraging such breadth of thought because it allows us to appreciate new aspects of the world we live in.

This was my starting point, a belief that other languages were 'better' at expressing different things. However, I have done a few projects requiring translation over the years and I have found European language speakers, notably Italian and German, preferring the freedom of English to the relative straightjackets of their respective mother tongues. As a Brit I am biased, however, there is a crucial difference betwee…

IMO this take really overstates the importance of prescriptive efforts to control the evolution of languages. In particular, the relative decline of French is easily explained by geopolitics. Outside officialdom the Académie is mostly ignored. French today is as packed with English loanwords as every other European language.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#284

Post by mrob »

lbriner wrote: post #262
mrob wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".

I'm British but I always understood it as the second meaning. e.g. "We were going to consider XYZ but now it's a moot point because the project is cancelled."

I've heard it used that way in the UK too, but the first meaning is traditional. Wiktionary has some examples:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot

I expect the US meaning will eventually become standard everywhere.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#285

Post by MrJohz »

mghackerlady wrote: post #268
MrJohz wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, I think that's partly because AAV doesn't have the political and national identity that some other similar dialects have. I (as a lay person with no training in linguistics) feel like AAV and Scots are similar in terms of how far away from English they are, and many people would describe Scots as its own language, distinct from English.

I completely disagree. At least in the US, AAV seems to be a major cultural thing for the people who speak it

But I think that national identity doesn't exist in the same way, do you know what I mean? Like, being Black/African American in the US is an important part of a person's identity, but it doesn't necessarily have the trappings of nationhood in the same way that Scottish identity does. That's not to say that the identity is any weaker, just that it manifests itself differently.

This means that AAV is culturally important, but there's not necessarily the same sense of "this is a separate language" that there is with Scots, even though in many ways it has all the same claims of being one.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#286

Post by jstanley »

debesyla wrote: post #277
ben_w wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically. 2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667 Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.

Wait, can this format be transformed back to the "normal" format? If so, then it could be kinda viable for some operations... :thinking_emoji:

No, it can't be transformed back because it has lost information.

2025-06 and 2026-05 both have the same digits, for example.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#287

Post by marcellus23 »

TimK65 wrote: post #176
prima-facie wrote: post #149

If you are from Europe, even if you're not living in the UK, the en-GB locale will feel a lot more familiar to you than the en-US one. It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe, the start of the week is on Monday (vs Sunday in the US), the default paper size is A4 (vs US letter), measurement defaults are metric (indeed UK roads use imperial, but the default is otherwise metric), the time format uses…

So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.

as an American this is my favorite format. Sortable, and the mm-dd order reflects the standard American way of writing month+day, and yyyy is unambiguously the year since it's 4 letters. Best of both worlds.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#288

Post by card_zero »

ben_w wrote: post #257
dhosek wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is now.

In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically. 2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667 Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.

Well that's just totally ambiguous. What you should do instead is treat the date as one long number and present its factors, for instance 2⁴⋅11⋅7649⋅15050023, much more practical.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#289

Post by irishcoffee »

unfamiliar wrote: post #123
ChrisRR wrote: post #80

Americans often don't twig how many random american terms we brits have to learn the double meaning of and don't pipe up about. I'm not talking the well-known ones like cookies, but even things like "the ER" meaning "A&E" Sometimes it's their turn to repay the favour

If you want to read some hilarious reactions of Americans panicking when they are suddenly exposed to non-American English/British accents, check out these threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/PawPatrol/comments/1q68v16/british_... https://www.reddit.com/r/PawPatrol/comments/17wcsdm/my_digit...

If those posts are examples of 'panicking' we have yet another idiom I've just learned about.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#290

Post by ben_w »

debesyla wrote: post #277
ben_w wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically. 2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667 Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.

Wait, can this format be transformed back to the "normal" format? If so, then it could be kinda viable for some operations... :thinking_emoji:

No, because "12".sort_by_digits() == "21".sort_by_digits()
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