OT Humour - Written & Spoken English

And all the place names too that are pronounced completely differently to their spelling. This part of England is especially confusing for strangers - some of the pronunciations bear no resemblance to the spelling at all!

My favourite has to be Happisborough in Norfolk - pronounced Hazebruh.

We put clothing on a hanger.

We park aircraft in a hangar.

They are pronounced differently here, the -er vs. the -ar are just a hint different in sound.

~KK in BC~

I find the biggest difference between the pronunciations of words come between the USA and Canadian versions because of spelling for the most part.

We add letters in some words like: honour, neighbour and colour for example.

~KK in BC~

And I thought I was good at spelling : ( I knew it didn't 'look' right but I wasn't sure why not. Thanks for clearing this up for me.

Butterfly (at least I can spell Butterfly correctly most of the time and can't spell the "teh" the any of the time :)

And at least some of those might be traced back to local early dialects that have been preserved in pronunciation long after the standardisation of spelling. Spoken language has a far longer history than written language, and is probably more deeply entrenched in the local population.

Accent has a lot to answer for. Just consider trying to listen to a conversation between a Yorkshireman and a Cockney . . . . to an American it would all sound "foreign" rofl. In America many of the spoken language differences/pronunciations relate to the ethnic mix of the early settlers in specific areas, or the effect of social isolation on pockets of population.

The one English name that always had me bemused was the terribly upper crust name of "St John". How that ever became "Sinjun" in an environment that imposes such a stylised and demanding pronunciation system had me beat until I was told it was derived from the Norman/French pronunciation - hence the "slurring" of the Saint. But I have never heard it in relation to place names like "St John's Wood".

I remember reading that Australia represented a language anomaly in that it represented a vast area with only minimal language variation. You can travel thousands of miles here and not hear a change of accent. Perhaps this is because we are so "young" and mass communication (at least across/within the continent) became the accepted norm relatively soon after European settlement. Perhaps it is a unifying national trait imposed by our early isolation from the rest of the world. Maybe it is because we were so heavily influenced by the first British settlers (although the same could be said of most of the US), or because of the minimal early impact of the spoken language of the indigenous aborigines on the early settlers (even though we now have some place names that would twist the tongues of even Welshmen, and which we have trouble determining the spelling of because the aborigines did not have written language lol). Who really knows? But the study of language and its influences is facinating.

I have enjoyed reading all the responses.

Ah hah! The British (Norman/French) influence. Australia has it too, although these days sadly the shorter Americanised spellings seem to be taking over. A failing of our education system in my opinion.

I cringe when I see what texting is doing to the written language though. I do believe that language is a dynamic force and is subject to constant change and innovation, t -

i h8 txt words + h8 cing it in ltrs + emls cul8r

(Aaahhhhhhhh!! runs screaming off in the distance!)

How about route rhymes with root which rhymes with flute, and rout rhymes with out.

hmmmm....

There was a rout out on the route to the root to make the flute.

Ack! Now my brain is infested with words!

NightMist done with digging and on to hoeing

Howdy!

Why do y'all say it wrong, anyway?

Of course it's that silent "f"--gets us every time!

R/Sandy--quilting near the edge... ;-D

I'm with you, Cheryl! And while we're at it, who's the (pardon my language, please! but it's a common word in American English now) dipshit who initiated the expression, "My bad." Can we hang that individual from the yardarm?

Come the revolution . . . . . I have a lamp post picked out with his/her name on it!!

When I first heard that, Sally, years ago, I gaped in wonder!! I love its quirkiness, too; along with my favourite surname: Featherstonehaugh - pronounced (for those who couldn't guess >gAnd all the place names too that are pronounced completely differently

very, very near ...! . In message , Sandy Ellison writes

It's those diphthongs again, Butterfly! We have kept all of ours, and most of yours have disappeared. . In message , Butterflywings writes

Oh! ouch. That was really painful, Cheryl. (shudder). . In message , CATS writes

you what?

I can't even *read* text messages that aren't written properly

It's a British variant.......It's what happens to your favourite coloured banque cheques when that gator gits 'em wet while you're looking through a catalogue for a puppet theatre, plough parts, jewellery and pyjamas and there's no circulating draught to dry them out before they mould. ;)

Val.........who has 4 British channels on the telly

When I worked for a someone with a strong East London accent, I can remember asking him to repeat an engineering term he had just used - it sounded like shvastoil. It was silver steel! I think he thought I was mad!

We once took DS and his then South African girlfriend out for a meal and she was convinced she had found a fellow countryman in the waiter, but he was a New Zealander.

My family tree on my maternal grandfather's side has been traced back to

1530 through the male line (Flude), all very straightforward and documented. However it stops there because of the difficulty with the spelling of the name - you can do a lot with Flude - Flood, Flydd, even Lloyd. Still I am quite happy with 1530 - it certainly brings history alive.

......and I've got the rope and KNOW how to tie the knot! That "my bad" grammatical atrocity just jacks my jaw.

Val

I checked out my favorite slang word/phrase origin site.......read on if you're interested.

"My bad"

Meaning: My mistake - I'm to blame.

Origin

This slang term originated in about 1970. At that time, i.e. pre the widespread use of the Internet, slang terms often circulated at street level for many years before being adopted by anyone who felt inclined to write them down. That's clearly not the case any longer of course and any word or phrase that is widely known is dateable quite precisely via website logs.

The first citation in print is C. Wielgus and A. Wolff's, 'Back-in-your-face Guide to Pick-up Basketball', 1986:

"My bad, an expression of contrition uttered after making a bad pass or missing an opponent."

Shakespeare used the term with something like the current meaning, in his Sonnet 112:

Your love and pity doth the impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow; For what care I who calls me well or ill, So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow?

That's clearly just coincidence, and it's hardly surprising that such a fragmentary phrase would appear in a large body of work like Shakespeare's. It's also a world away from pick-up basketball, which is an informal street sport where players frequently call out to each other (trash talking), and is a well-known source of street lang.

'My bad' came into widespread popular use in the mid to late-1990s in the USA via the 1995 movie ?Clueless?. This starred Alicia Silverstone and contains what seems to have been the first use of the phrase in the mainstream media. The 1994 'Green revision pages' for the movie script has a scene with the Alicia Sliverstone character learning to drive:

"Cher swerves - to avoid killing a person on a bicycle. Cher: Whoops, my bad."

Although a street term, it is virtually synonymous with the earlier Latin phrase, 'mea culpa'. It doubtless has as little of a direct descent from this as it does from Shakespeare's Sonnet 112.