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Flavor vs. Flavour
An anonymous reader writes "A recent flamewar ensued on the Linux kernel mailing list, this time debating the proper spelling of 'flavor', or is it 'flavour'? Even Linux creator Linus Torvalds joined the fray with some rather humorous comments. For the most part, it sounds like spellings will stay as they are, but it makes for an entertaining read."
I suggest we all, in a show of universal brotherhood and cultural tolerance, join hands and announce to the world:
Linux: It gots much flavah!
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Is it just me, or is that not a flamewar at all? Flamewars are all-out textual brawls; this appears to be some mild discussion with the most offensive line of text referring to being born in the US as 'unfortunate'. And after that outbreak, the situation mostly resolved itself.
OH NO! HNNGG! BURRRN! TAKE THAT! These guys are obviously flame-war masters, with the powers to bring forth Derek Smart levels of binary cacophony.
If I'm not mistaken (and I'm drawing on Grade 2 or 3 here), "flavour" is the proper English spelling (UK and Canada and Australia), whereas "flavor" is the common spelling (US). There are lots of words like that, including colour (color), centre (center), and idiot (ijit).
Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
sounds like 2 things going on..
1. most of the original code was written in europe, so they use many european spellings, and
2. changing spellings globally often breaks things, so it's something they just don't do anymore.
Making the naming consistent seems like a good idea. It seems obvious that you could save a few bits by removing those extra "u" characters, so the American spelling should be used. The smaller the better, right?
:-)
It has nothing to do with the fact that I live on the Western side of "the pond."
<?php while ($self != "asleep") { $sheep_count++; } ?>
Next week will we be covering Linus's trip to the bathroom?
I just have to say, this is possibly the saddest thing I've ever seen posted to /. in the 2 years I've been coming here. Is this TRULY the only news we have to post? A semantic debate over one alternate spelling?
(-1, Troll...)
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
It's an article about Torvalds' offhand comments about a flame war about the spelling of a non-critical word in the kernel tree.
Man, if I'd only subscribed I could have seen this way early!
The coolest voice ever.
I'd say we should kill this thing now...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Linux so customizable you can even change the language used to describe it.
If you don't understand, look at it from this point of view: the spelling of "flavor" is not very important, but, due to the international status of Linux, and OSS in general, how can we be sure that quality code will be developed even at times of international strain? (e.g, Iraqi developer/US developer working on the same OSS project. Even though Saddam would probably never give someone an opporotunity to do such a thing.)
flavor vs. flavour.
Next!
...catsup vs. ketchup debate.
Here's the real question: how many instances of the word are in the code/texts--and by extension, how many bytes will using the US spelling shave off the final size?
"A recent flamewar ensued on the Microsoft executive mailing list, this time debating the proper spelling of 'Linux'. Is it 'Linux,' 'GNU/Linux', 'cancer,' 'our biggest threat', or 'our second-biggest threat'?"
The coolest voice ever.
The common spelling south of the M-D line is "idjit." But, in your defense, the 'd' is silent. . . .
How wierd to have a spelling flamewar on the intarweb. I mean, today its 'flavor' and tommorow it's 'center'. All people have to do is look at there us and uk dictionary's to find a menchion of which word is correct, and if its in both, then use both. Alot of problems could be avoided this way and their would be piece!.
(all common annoying spelling mistakes in this post were on purpose, for the humo(u)r impaired)
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying, that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
My personal preference for spelling is flavour, colour, honour, etc. not that anyone really cares but if we want to talk about which more closely resembles puritanical english, then we would have to go with color, honor, flavor, because in all senses the u that gets thrown in is simply an affectation from French. If it saves a few milliseconds and bits then by all means.
So is there going to be a debate on using color over colour?
In other news, when asked for his interpretation, SCO CEO Darl McBride stated that it's spelled "E-Z-M-O-N-E-Y" and pronounced "CHA-CHING."
done!
Lets use another language with less ambiguities in words.. say Esperanto or finnish (Linux is from finland?) We will never agree on which english is correct (US english or UK/Euro english).
You must be one of them!"
</simpsons>
<!--Maybe I should've used the groening tag above? Let's argue about it.-->
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Flavour or flavor, pretty insigificant really. there are more important things like getting kernel 2.6 done.
Sad fuckers.
In the fourth grade, I read War of the Worlds, in which theater was spelled "theatre". A few days after having finished it, I had to take a spelling test. One of the words was "theater", only I spelled it the other way, so it was marked wrong and I did not get a one hundred on the test. To this day, I hold that one test as a grudge against the British.
Maybe I'm supposed to be a bigger nerd to find this rant funny.
-Rabbit
Thankyou, I hadn't been made aware of this before, it's good to know.
How about we settle on "it tastes good"...
Honestly, a debate like this cannot be resolved in a flamewar, a spelling bee on the other hand....
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
As much as I like and prefer Linux over Windows, this is the kind of thing that would make a normal person second guess linux as a "real" operating system.
"You mean these people who are supposedly developing a world class operating system and major competitor to Windows are yelling at eachother over the proper spelling of words? I should take these guys seriously why?"
Flavor
eg. "These FREEDOM FRIES have a great flavor!"
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
This is possibly the dumbest Slashdot post ever. Who cares? Oh, I'm sorry... Linus commented on it, so it must be newsworthy.
Jesus, post something worthwhile, or don't post it at all.
no it doesn't
It sounds incredibly pretentious. Not that any variation of English spelling can help but be brain-damaged, but "flavour" obviously has to be pronounced "flaveuuurr" in a Monty-Python-grade French accent.
Because we're being space efficient. Think of all the extra space, both on disks, and on paper, that one extra character in so many words takes. The English language has far too many letters which are just there-and serve no purpose. Elimination of any one (such as the U when unnecessary, as in this case) is a good thing. Seriously though, it's because we're lazy.
This can only officially be resolved with a Slashdot poll.
Chant with me, poll, poll, poll...
Linus Torvalds joined the fray with some rather humorous comments.
You Americans don't know how to spell humourous.
This space left intentionally blank.
armour
Now there is a good word, and a good spelling.
I'm an American, but spelling mostly affected by playing a Swedish mud...
nuclearwar.astrakan.hig.se 4080
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Its because of aluminium poisoning. Sorry, aluminum.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Jasper Spaans, who changed Flavour to flavor needs controlling. This would never be acceptable behavour in a commercial environment, you cannot just change things like this because you feel like it.
God knows what bugs have been introduced by this change, did he test everything that was effected by the change??? Time is wasted because of this - due to retesting etc.
If anyone behaved like this in a company, they'd be instantly roasted.
Changing Flavour to Flavor just because *he* favours the other spelling is totally out of control, and really, quite arrogant and very unprofessional.
Loose Cannon.
How do the Chinese spell it?
When you set your region for time zones it should detect changes in word variations.
Yeah, let's release language-dependent kernels! And while we're at it, why not release some useless service-packs?
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
...but what if you're like me, and use flavor, flavour, flavah and flayver all as seperate variable names in the same code?!
=Smidge=
Let's be rational about this.
Let's exercise a, little bit of good taste. Let's try to
come up with a tasty region-neutral replacement word for
flavor/flavour. Maybe something that doesn't
suffer from the dual spelling handicap.
Damnit, what could it be!?
I can almost taste it!
Clearly it should be water closet. Hang on while I whip up a patch to change every occurrence of 'toilet' in the kernel to 'water_closet' =)
in america, canada, britain, etc etc we all speak mostly English there is no such language as american just lazy people who stole english and changed a few words because they were too dumb to learn to spell. use correct english for f*cks sake. or it will soon be: "Linucks kernal" and "pee aych pee" and "piethon" now give us some real news and change it back to correct english "flavour"
Oh thats right, not the same as colour or flavour. Its flavor/color in my book because of that, and not having to write the extra letter.
Hello, this is Leenoos Toorvahlds and I spell flavor, f-l-a-v-o-u-r.
the correct spelling of linux flavor/flavour:
DEBIAN
my blog
And glamour, labour, etc.
Oh - neither 'duh' nor 'uh' are words.
whose native language is it? England's.
tyhere was a humorous discussion involoving the difference between :
license and licence
... hi bingo
Hehe I'm not sure how much space it would save. I don't normally see the word flavo(u)r appear often in my irregular perusal of the kernel tree. And if you really want to go detailed, due to the cluster sizes on filesystems it probably wouldn't change the size on disk (unless it went one byte over, which has a low chance of happening). Also as far as downloads go, and decent compression algo would virtually eradicate its effect. So let's not excuse the bizarre US spelling by saying it uses up less space :)
Yet another slow day at /. today.
This sort of disagreement can only be resolved with a fork.
signed,
BSD
Use Python
We were frequently having these debates at my company. We decided upon an easy, non-disputable resolution. Look up both words on google, count the hits, and use the most prevalent one.
For Flavour/Flavor, that would be:
Flavour: 771,000
Flavor: 2,740,000
No contest.
perhaps we should spell it as the french do?
Sitting Walrus Blog
1.Flavore
2.Flevor
3.Flirst Porst
4.PROFIT!!!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Is that we spell metre as "meter", and aside from science, etc, we rarely EVER use the word. You'd think all the scientists could just say "You know what, lets spell the word right. Okay. Done."
The British spell it nuclear, while we spell it nuculear
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Which dictionary? I haven't seen it in any yet. Allot is there, but as that's a different spelling with a different meaning it's not the same word.
In a traditional development team, this sort of argument can waste valuable boardroom time, raise blood pressures and ruin everyone's day. Here at least it only consumed a teensy bit of mailing list bandwidth and the wiser souls can just ignore it completely.
In the original post...
It changes all occurrences of 'flavour' to 'flavor' in the complete tree;
I've just comiled all affected files (that is, the config resulting from
make allyesconfig minus already broken stuff) succesfully on i386.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
The American spellings were implemented by Teddy Roosevelt when he was Secretary of Commerce, IIRC. The official reason was to save printing ink, but the real reason was to be "not British". It's not the original English spelling, but neither is what the Brits use either.
You have to love a creative country where an actor was President and the Terminator might become a Governor. At least they don't take politics as seriously as some have spelling.
The issue of American spelling of various words, has been of great interest to me this year, as I simultaneously start to write my PhD thesis and also learn the German language.
I live in New Zealand, yes one of those countries colonised by the great British empire. Here of course we write with the British spelling (ie. English spelling used by the rest of the world). However this is under threat from the ever prevalent American spelling, mostly due to the internet, and things like Microsoft Word and e-mail spell checkers defaulting to the US spelling (Yes I know how to change it but very many people do not - Actually I use LaTeX so this is a moot point for me). Teachers used to mark this alternative spelling quite harshly, but now I feel they are giving up.
This raised a few issues, for me mostly when I find information on the internet I am conscious to try with both spellings. I got caught out in Bugzilla with this.
Interestingly the changes the US have made to the language not only include spelling changes, But also grammatical. An example is "to dream" the American is: "dreamed" whilst the British is: "dreamt". These grammatical differences are seen in all American movies and TV shows shown around the world.
I am not American bashing in any way, but these issues are non-trivial.
it has to be, or are we all going to be comiling the kernels we download frrom kernel.org now?
Up here in Canada, centre is the noun, and center is the verb.
So The Medical Centre, and you center your sights on a target.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I went there in 3rd grade, came back after 5th, those oh-so-critical years where you're learning how to spell. =( I had to re-learn how to spell both times. Thankfully, I'm now blessed with being bilingual in that regard.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Besides, if it weren't for the US, you'd probably be spelling it '(das) Aroma' anyway.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Every once in a while, the mailing lists tell how it should be converted to all US spellings.
The solution that is used is in the
colour.h header, at the bottom there is a
#define wxColor wxColour
to help those who have difficulty using the UK spelling.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
in English, and not dictated by some zealous national linguistic academy (* koff koff France *). So in the Commonwealth countries we have "flavour," and in the US we have "flavor". In Enghald it's "labour," over here it's "labor."
So, let's accept that both spellings are correct, and not get our panties in an uproaur over this.
Someone you trust is one of us.
That's why we kicked German and Japanese ass during WW2. We don't complicate matters, we just get the job done. Adding unnecessary letters to words is a waste of time. Why bother?
...shouldn't that be humourous?
I fail to see how this relates to eyeball juices.
The coolest voice ever.
(Note that I meant any variation, including ours. US spelling is a little less bizzare than British, but it's still stupidly inconsistent compared to, say, Spanish.)
As you can see, one part of this header is spelled with a u and the other without. This could create some developer confusion.
You aren't the real Seth, are you ?
If you are going to impersonate someone, why don't you impersonate someone all slashbots love to respond and talk to . . . like Bruce Perens ?
If they're going to be removing 'u's, then they should be careful so that they don't inadvertently replace 'Linux' with 'Linx'. This kind of debate is fcking stpid anyway.
Imagine you were grepping through the kernel code and you want to match the occurence of flavor or is it flavour? This becomes a problem somehow and needs to be addressed. Maybe they could compile a list of those kind of words and everytime it comes up, mention both words i.e There are many flavors/flavours of Linux distributions.
I had no idea this type of story could make it to Slashdot. I'm going to start submitting the comments I see in the various articles now! Front page, HERE I COME!
"Derp de derp."
Talk about a slow news day. McBride from SCO must have taken the day off. Since we are on the subject of stupid Euro-words, the one that erks me the most is "Centre". How on earth do you turn "Center" into "Centre"?
My personal opinion is that Euro words are a plot by the French to subvert the English language. However, Euro words helped us beat the Germans in WW II. Remember the WWII movie where the German spies impersonating US Soldiers asked for Petrol instead of Gas. Even though they spoke fluent english it revealed that they weren't Americans.
CATsup over Ketchup!!
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
blame Webster.
-pyrrho
...and decide whether to use The Oxford Dictionary (which the U.K. and Canadian Governments are supposed to use for official English spelling) or Websters Dictionary for the U.S. spelling.
Of course, since the most number of Linux Distros and installations are going to be in the U.S., why not just use the American spelling. Here in Canada we use the 'British' spelling, but slowly we're migrating over to the American way (even though we deny it, we're doing it, just ask people here whether it's 'zee' or 'zed').
"Flag on the Moon, how did it get there?"
As a Brit working in the US, I have this debate over colour vs color all the time.
There is a resolution to it. The 'recognised' standard for American English is Websters - and it allows both flavor and flavour (and color and colour). The recognised standard for British English is the Oxford English dictionary - and it recognises ONLY flavour and colour.
Hence, the most compatible choice is Flavour and Colour since those should be recognisable on both sides of the atlantic where Flavor and Color are most definitely mis-spellings of British English.
Case solved!
www.sjbaker.org
Isn't this more or less how the different BSDs got started?
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
"I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way."
Why not go with the leet speak spelling instead?
f14v3r
By going with leet speak, we can all just happily accept that it's wrong will keeping the stupidity level universal.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
It has come to my attention a recent discussion on the so called "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters: Slashdot.org" website concerning the use of the terms "flavour" and "flavour".
I hereby state that the whole english language, when used in conjuction to develop a *nix platform belongs to SCO.
No! Actually - Bugger that, we *own* the english langage!
Without the proper purchased licenses, the rest of the world is obligated to speak another language.
Regards,
Darl McBride
Comment removed based on user account deletion
obviously, flavour is a word of the English language, and flavor is a word of the American language. We just have to warm up the nearest handy i18n software to facilitate communications between people of disparate languages such as these.
A story on /., home of the non-editors, about someone else's discussion about the proper spelling of a word? This is like eunuchs reporting on behind-the-scenes secret techniques of porn stars.
If you're modifying or adding to someone else's code, use whatever convention they used so you don't screw up references to header files or functions or whatever sort of like what Gene Heskett described. If you're creating something from scratch, then use whatever convention you prefer, or whatever convention your included files use.
Of course, my own contribution to the useless code changes department was that I changed an error message for our sendmail's "-k" option (kill the running sendmail daemon) to: "sendmail: I see no daemon here.". Not sure if it was ever appreciated, but at least customers could see that one :-)
If Washington Shows, we defeated the British again, else we can say Blair bamboozled 'W'.
You get arguments like this all over the net. Although I read this thread and save for a couple of jokes it was not anything otehr than a brief patch discussion with no arguing or flaming.
:)
But this really bothers me, I am american so I naturally leave off the u, but it doesn't matter to me when people add a "u" or reverse an "er" or switch a "z" and an "s" or say lorry.
Why do so many americans act like some foriegner is destroying their language whenever this happens? And why do so many British English speakers smuggly act like their spelling or phrasing is clearly more intelligent, refined or whatever? Do you all act the same way to non-english words? you have to assume that spelling will either homogenize, or that multiple spellings will become universally accepted, with the internet bringing all these english speakers together and whatnot. I recently heard a piece on the radio about South Africa which made the claim that it was becoming much more common for youths to intermix various words from the various languages in the country, because since the end of apartheid people are being brought together much more.
Of course recently I've been listening to the BBC World Service at night and it did take a few days to get used to the reporters fondness for the word "row" as in "argument" which I had never heard before, not to mention a use of the term "washing-up liquid" that I found quite humorous
They should be glad the world language isn't dutch. We never agree, even amongst ourselves on how the hell to spell several concatenated words, nor how to properly spell several if not most verbs. And if we DO agree after years of bickering; they change the damned language so it all starts anew. Then again, it's fun to have foreigners try to pronounce dutch words or names, hehehe. Always a blast, even though we in some cases can't agree on how to pronounce some dutch names ourselves...
Hate me!
...and slashdot says next to nothing about that.
Perhaps they should rename it "Some for Nerds"?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
There was a good reason for the change. An example in the discussion was like this:
1357: rpc_authflavor_t authflavour;
which means that there are inconsistencies in the variable naming, which could lead to confusion later on.
Vote for global prefs bug
Interesting observation
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Why does this article make front page? More important things like the new release of Ruby (a minor version change) was only available in the developers section, but arguing over two perfectly fine orthograph of flavour/flavor somehow is more important?
if you want to right a major amount of code you can pick if words have a U in them or not, and others should respect your choice in that section, and where they have done major work they can make the convention. Lets face it its pretty easy, names and comments could be required in finnish or even worse french.... don't like color or colour #define it....
;-)
#define colour coloXXr
#define color coloXXr
repeat for others.... but best not mention sulphur to me, I just think the amercian smelling looks ugly, but I am english just #define me
James
I can't remember exactly who said it, but a linguiast once said that a "Standard language is just a dialect with an army."
The "flavour/flavor" variation was part of an attempt by Noah Webster to simplify and make more consistent the spelling of words in the American dialect. One can argue whether the attempt was misguided or not, but it certainly hasn't been the only one. George Bernard Shaw also tried to make spelling more consistent (see the preface of his play "Pygmalion" for more detail).
Changing standardized (or standardised) spelling to make it more consistent is just one of those pastimes that occasionally crop up amongst speakers of English. For some reason it seems to crop up amongst the Brits more than the Yanks, I suppose because the British spellings are even more inconsistent than American, but in any event it seldom takes hold.
The standardized spellings, especially the British spellings, retain the history of how they used to be pronounced. You don't see the variation as much in other languages, say French or German for instance, because both of those languages were standardized much later than English. In fact, English was never really standardized at all. But the Brothers Grimm researched fairy tales in part to come up with a standardized version of German, and that is why German spelling is much more consistent than English. The French on the other hand set up an institute to standardize French under Napoleon.
So each of those two countries went through standardization processes for their respective languages in the early 19th century.
English on the other hand just... accumulated. The "first" dictionary was by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. From there, the standard spellings were decided culturally, with whatever dictionary that was most fashionable at the time becoming the standard. In America, this was Webster's Dictionary. The British finally, sort of, standardized on the Oxford English Dictionary, but this was compiled mostly by scholars who were interested in the history of the language rather than reformers who would have tried to make it more consistent.
There certainly are reasons why the spelling of English should be made more consistent. I, for one, would love to see the death of the letter "k". It's useless, ugly, and inefficient. Just use "c" and change all the instances where "c" makes a sibilant es sound to "s". Use "z" always for the voiced es. Change all voiced instances of "th" to "dh". Change all initial instances of "ph" to "f". Change all instances of voiced "g" to "j", and all instances where "j" represents the dipthong "ie" to "y". And so on.
Those are just some obvious suggestions for making English spelling more consistent. None of them will happen of course. Whether they should is not a debate I want to get into here. I like being able to see the history of our language in its spelling varieties. I can also understand the desire for a more consistent representation of our language.
As for "flavour" and "flavor", neither spelling is more "correct" than the other. One simply reflects its historical provenance better, and the other its pronunciation. Variety is the spice of life. Pick your flavour (or flavor).
Even Linux creator Linus Torvalds took a healthy dump today.
Big whoop!
Those of us who aren't participating in this cult of personality get irritated seeing a stupid story like this. But then we read that Linus, the god himself, got involved and....well now I see why this stupid story made it to the "big time" of Slashdot.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
why americans object to the superfluous "u" in words like flavour, favour, neighbour, etc., i'll never know.
Because they're fuucking stuupid.
Maybe I missed something, but who exactly gets to go around and tell people which version of what language is the standard? Is this one of those United Nations things? Or did I skip a ISO-bulletin?
There are 60 million people in Great Britain and 260 million in the U.S., which at least tells us what the norm is. Hollywood (where people with British accents are either evil or buttlers) and rock music (originally banned in the U.K.) both are pushing the American forms throughout the world to the point where the Brits are adopting them (try to find a Brit who still says "lorry" instead of "truck" and doesn't remember WW II first hand). British English is getting more quaint by the hour.
What is more, American English has the original forms, basically because we colonials were happy to be able to read and write at all, while the Brits had all of this free time to fool around with their spelling and pronounciation. If you check Mr. Shakespeare's manuscripts, you'll find color, not colour, and the pronounciation and spelling of alumin(i)um (Brits "aluMINIum", Yanks "ALUminum") started out the American way, until those bloody English blokes started going continental on us for a while.
Anyway, the thing to remember is that it isn't all that important. The real reason to have different versions is to have fun in the Buffy episode where they all lose their memory (Willow bungles a spell) and Spike and Giles think they are father and son...
I'm a Kiwi (New Zealander) living in the US. Some funny things I've noticed between my english (basically British I guess) and american other than spelling and general hood / bonnet, trunk / boot or the meaning of fanny type stuff:
I might say "I couldn't care less". Americans say they "could care less" but mean the same thing. A negative seems to be lost somewhere there.
If I'm sick I might be "in hospital". An american would be in "the hospital" even when nobody knows which one.
"All set" is one of the most frequent expressions I hear. I might say it if I'm ready to go somewhere or start something They say it to mean a general "okay".
The only time I've ever really been caught out by the language was with "entree" in a resturant.
flavor" is the common spellingCommon? Surely flavour would be the most common usage? I expect more people in the world use English rather than 'merican. Basically the American empire uses American (flavor) and the British Commonwealth (inc India) uses English (flavour).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Talk about a slow news day. McBride from SCO must have taken the day off. Since we are on the subject of stupid Euro-words, the one that erks me the most is "Centre". How on earth do you turn "Center" into "Centre"?
:)
Actually, the word is derived from the French word "centre". British English spells it also "centre". How on earth did Americans turn "centre" into "center"?
My personal opinion is that Euro words are a plot by the French to subvert the English language.
Considering that the English language is a hack of various European languages you shouldn't be surprised that a huge portion of our language was borrowed from French. As for subverting English, if you removed all the "Euro words" you'd have nothing left but a handful of colloquialisms and various names.
However, Euro words helped us beat the Germans in WW II. Remember the WWII movie where the German spies impersonating US Soldiers asked for Petrol instead of Gas. Even though they spoke fluent english it revealed that they weren't Americans.
Okay, now I *know* you're an American -- your knowledge of history is derived purely from Hollywood movies!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"Flavor" fits most US accents. Think about it:
- Boston: FLAV-ah (Pahk teh cahr at havahd yahd)
- New York: FLAY-vuh (think almost Tony Soprano-ish)
- Texas: Flaayyy-VER (Cowfolk style, think George Bush +80 IQ points)
- California: flAY-ver!! ohmigod! (Valley girl style)
- All are easily represented by the spelling "Flavor".
Where "Flavour" fits the rest of the world's accents:- UK: FLAY-voor (like Eric Idle)
- France: ah-flah-VOUR (like French people)
- Australia: Fulav-or (Steve Erwin)
- These look more correct as "Flavor".
Can't speak for Linus on this matter, the only thing I have ever heard Linus say was "Hello my name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux 'Linux'."CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Someone got into the habit of spelling beere as beer. Before you know it over time it became known as beer.
My point is that english is always changing and both the American and English versions today are correct. A century and a half of isolation is what caused the American drift in standard english. Today because of television, education, and the internet, Britian and the US are knitted back together.
Infact English is still changing thanks to the internet. The way we use nouns as adjuctives for technical slang is changing it some more.
http://saveie6.com/
$ echo 'main(){ printf("flavor!\n"); }' >fl.c ./a.out ./a.out
$ cc fl.c
$
Segmentation fault
$ TZ=GMT
flavor!
$
Purging the Linux Kernel of stolen SCO code?
So does anyone find that the American spellings of these words are becoming more prevalent? One example I've always found interesting is the English billion vs the American billion. The english is 10^12, where the American billion is 10^9. It gets more screwy at trillion, where an English trillion is 10^18, while an American trillion is 10^12.
The point of mentioning this is that from what I've heard the American definitions of billion, trillion, etc are becoming more popular in the UK.
Being an American I've always thought the English definitions were inconsistant, since they have a seperate name for 10^0, 10^3, 10^6, but then suddenly start only giving seperate names at 10^6 intervals.
Obviously the spelling of flavour vs flavor is fairly irrelevant, and doesn't have the same issues as the definition of billion does. But I'm still curious if spellings have that same bleed-over factor.
AccountKiller
...but this story takes the fuckin' cake. This is why I don't make eye contact with anyone in my CS classes.
--
silence is poetry.
we're such groupies
In the fourth grade, I read War of the Worlds, in which theater was spelled "theatre". A few days after having finished it, I had to take a spelling test. One of the words was "theater", only I spelled it the other way, so it was marked wrong and I did not get a one hundred on the test. To this day, I hold that one test as a grudge against the British.
If I were in your place, I'd hold a grudge against tests.
-kgj
Now that we have that established, let me elaborate:
Back in the day when webster was starting out, we Americans has this little disagreement with the Brittish. You might recall that some things were changed just as a nice little #$@# off to the Commonwealth. Case in point: driving on the right side of the road (not to start a flame war, but economically and logically it doesn't make sense)
Well between Webster's desire to change the language himself, and the desire to reduce the number of letters in commonly used words (letters = money for printers) Webster started changing shit just cause he could.
At the point when Webster created his dictionary, the concept that there WAS such a thing as a "correct" spelling was just beginning to take hold.
For correct reason, see quote Robin Williams Live on Broadway 2002 in reference to a parallel situation: King James breaking away from Rome and starting the Anglican church:
"Ha ha! Whose the fucking pope now!"
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
To paraphrase a professor when I was taking Commonwealth classes, "Your spelling isn't proper, but you are American so I guess you are entitled."
YUou want to talk about spelling? Go ask Dennis Richie about the spelling of creat.........
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
The correct spelling is colour, not color.
My rights don't need management.
Seems obvios to me too. ;-)
:-)
P.S. I live on the Western side of the pond too, but I spell things "flavour", "colour" and "centre"
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
Here's my favorite:
Certainly one might want to change:
int TheVariableThatWillBeUsedAsACounter;
to..
int i;
I really don't see the point of this argument. It's the colo(u)r of our character and the flavo(u)r of our personalities that is important. My years in theater(theatre) class have taught me to love my neighbo(u)r no matter their behavio(u)r. I hope nobody finds any humo(u)r in this, and can just return to writing those C++ programs(programmes).
What's in a sig?
First we spent years of time and hundreds of man-hours debating whether it was pronounced lie-nucks, lee-nuks, or li-nuks.
Now this.
If we all spent this time coding and debugging instead of debating crap like this that simply does not matter, Linux would be the first totally error and bug free OS on the planet.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
You mean we should spell "flavour" s a v e u r ???
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
The reason the American version is different form the English version is the attempt to make words more intuitive. The u in colour and flavour doesn't affect the pronunciation of the word. That type of spelling, at least to me, is a product of when language was used as an elitist function to separate the learned from the unwashed masses. I prefer it without the u, giving a more uniform language, than dressing up words with useless letters. (And I believe we have a long way to go to drop English-American language problems... to too two, there they're their, etc...)
Where do the bulk of the developers live? If they live in the US, then 'flavor' should be the preferred spelling. If the bulk live outside the US where British spelling reigns supreme, then the UK's 'flavour' should be used.
I thought my life was boring, then this pops up. Suddenly, I feel a whole lot better about things.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Between posting to /. and downloading pr0n, try reading up a little about the historical roots of English language and the USA. You'll find, funnily enough, that the US didn't export English to the English, but those wacky Englander-guys actually made it up themselves with a little help from some guy in a kilt, some other guy named Saxon, and a whole bunch of Eurotrash who dropped into Buckingham Palace for tea with the Queen.
History: it's not just what happened on Springer two days ago.
It seems that the general concensus is flavour is better than flavor. So an American attempt at standardization and simpllification is bad, but a European attempt like the metric system kicks ass, right?
Dear kettle,
you are black.
sincerely,
the pot
Honestly though, from someone who was forced to take a course on the history of English, its all pretty my arbitrary and made up.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Ok, gotta' quote this:
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spellingby Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
As a US citizen, I for one don't recognize(-se) Webster's as my standard...I much prefer the New Oxford American Dictionary, (2001). Webster's just seems a little to casual and not as rigorously researched and edited. Besides, the N.O.A.D. is from the same organization as the Oxford English Dictionary, the British standard, so it is IMHO in the best position to illustrate the American vs. British language variants.
Which, BTW, the New Oxford American Dictionary specifies flavor only, with a parenthetical note that the British spelling happens to be flavour. But in American English, flavour is not an acceptable spelling.
On a side note, the web community seems to need help with their spelling too. Consider:
Reminds me of a project I worked on where we had a contractor doing some Oracle stuff, and he erroneously spelled "password" with an extra "s", as in "passsword".
*sigh*
The entire length of the project (just over a year) we were constantly having to re-learn how to spell password (there was a lot of security in the site). We finally managed to do so by the end of the project. Well, now that it's over, I'm _STILL_ trying to un-re-learn how to spell it!
To this day, it amazes me how much grief one little "s" can cause.
$0.02 (CDN)
Or should that be horrour?
We Geeks are having a discussion about grammar?!? Hasn't anybody thought about considerations more important than grammar?
Flavor is the obvious choice here. The unnecessary 'u' is another 8 bits every time it occurs. It's 64 bits with wide character support!!! That's eight freaking bytes. Don't any of you care about kernel bloat?
Another interesting difference in US/UK usage is number agreement for a collective noun.
In the US, the usage would be "Microsoft agrees". We apparently look upon a company or any group with a proper as a name as a single entity rather than a collective. In Microsoft's case, the company is also sen as a rapacious monolith, so obviously it wouldn't scan to say "rapacious monolith agree". One would have to say 'rapacious monolith agrees", but then they'd just go right out and violate that agreement.
(I'm actually nitpick2, but I can't remember my password)
At least Flavour vs Flavor is irrelevant, they're both in the dictionary. My pet peeve is people who spell "lose" as "loose".
;-)
CORRECT conjugation of the verb "To Lose":
"I hope you don't lose your keys"
BAD BAD BAD! WHERE DID YOU SEE THIS CRAP conjugation:
"I hope you don't loose your keys"
Don't get me started on apostrophe error's...
When I read, for example, "SCO are a bunch of idiots," I feel a need to change it around in my head to "SCO is a bunch of idiots."
But don't everybody change on my account. I can adjust, given time.
Or something like that. But then again, that only works in C/C++ and it's probably bad programming practice.
The original Wiki on the subject is here Looks like it could use some updating on this subject.
As Americans, it is our right to misspell, mispronounce, fuck or kill anything we come across. That's why the French hate us.
Oh hell, like it matters.
The whole point of communicating is getting the idea across. Now, don't get me wrong, spelling and grammer matter. I just don't think they matter enough to argue over.
It's a proven fact that languages constantly evolve, at least if it's getting any "better" or "worse". After all, evolution is just change, even if it's a matter of languages.
The only place I could ever seeing it matter is when you're naming variables, as seems to be what sparked this whole thing. Who really cares? As long as it's consistant, I sure don't.
And yeah, I've coded using both ways of spelling, with "colour" or "flavour" and with "color" or "flavor". One extra little automated step to "s/{@|%}*color/{@|%}@*colour" or just type it differently or whatever makes almost no difference in the whole scheme of things.
Whatever gets the job done...
heck I don't even know if I spelled the guy's name right, but he's the bad ass with the clock on his neck.
Key being, Public Enemy was overclocked almost to the point of bein racist, but the real ideal, is that they saw where MTV was going. Real visionaries, and where MTV is at, is basically hell. I give Public Enemy props for standing on one side of the line to counterbalance the fools on the other.
God spoke to me
I've always been confused why people claim to write in "English", but then refuse to write with the same spelling as English people. Explicitly using a qualifier (as in "American English") is more helpful, but the qualified expression still seems somewhat contradictory since an American is not an Englishman. And what qualifier does one use to describe the English used in England? "English English"? Oh no, that sounds silly, so we must broaden our qualifier to cover the whole British Isles (in all their variety of language!): "British English". Hmm.
Perhaps we need to replace the broader use of the word "English" with a new word which is not tied to a specific country?
nut cases! dont have better job on weekends or what? american spelling is wrong. fyi - its still English, meaning a language spoken by the people of England, which is on the other side of the pond. Now you people have over taken ur "mother ship" england economically and militarily and accrued enough gall to call your version of english to be correct. wtf? you are mere imitators of what the brits started. None of the other english speaking countries have fucked up their brains into believing that their english is the "correct" english. whats with u ass hats?
Revisionist shit or not, the flavour spelling would look more like "aroma" (at least that's what babelfish tells me the German is) if the US didn't do things like it did.
Whilst I don't usually agree with US-isms, I think that it should be "flavor". My reasoning? Most hardware seems to be US made, and in addition, the deletion of x million "u" letters from the code will probably save a couple of kilobytes of space :D
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Scru th UK, les letrs = betr. Making a wrd ovrly long 4 no reson is ! a gud thing. Ill tek Armor, Flavor, Color any day ovr th our countrparts. Ad 2 th fact, th our versions sound funy wen u se them.
Install Craig David, problem solved.
Now, it seems to Me that this is all terribly unfair and I inevitably put forth the proposition that a completely new language be the only allowed language for said mailing list. This would be the most fair solution, since everyone would then be subjected to equal difficulty in having to learn a new language. I typically suggest Klingon as it seems to be fairly expressive even though it does possibly give an unfair advantage to the star trek geeks who already speak it.
To stay strictly on-topic, Klingons wouldn't have silly arguments about whether or not "baknath" should or should not have a 'u' in it somewhere...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Since the largest variable/folder/file must be upto 4 letters long how about flav.
;b
(appended to the end of comments you post)
Anonymous coward!
If I want to, I can go into the source code and change the spellings in the comments!
Yeah, I posted anonymously, and yeah I made spelling mistakes, who gives a shit you god damn american fucks. Your prez was a fuckin alcholic who has said the most retarded quotes by any person of office in history. As one wise comedian once said: 'You go this way we give you a beer and a hockey stick, you go that way they give you a TEK-9 and a crack pipe'
I wonder if Nasa has lost any mars missions over color / colour conversions 8)
Well Hell Homer, 399 posts in a few hours is not bad for slow news - including yours DICK!
flavor - 2,720,000
flavour - 759,000
flavore - 404
flavar - 120
fleva - 422
flava - 166,000
flatulence - 114,000
I guess it should be "flavor".
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
In this spirit, I've submitted a patch to fix the "flavor" patch. Kick some Yankee a$$ oh yeah!1
/flavou?r/ .02
;-)
cLive
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
What's wrong with you? You're one of THEM aren't you?
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
Here in the US, if you go to newly engineered suburbia, it's hard not to stumble across an "Olde Towne Centre". Thing is, the presence in that environment reinforces the fact that it is a fruity and archaic spelling, and some misguided developer is trying to sell the sophistication of *their* Outback Steakhouses and Home Depots.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
homour ... I mean humor ... oh dammit ... funniness.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
I know Russian and a couple of others, but have long ago given up on English. If you know what I mean, then it's "good enuf".
-cp-
ALL of you fuckers are absolute RETARDS! Fucking Nazi bin Laden queers.
Now THAT's a flamewar! :-)
[n/t]
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
On that note
Isn't odd to be named "Catherine Zeta Jones"
How can you be named after a greek letter? What kind of a name is that?
What the hell is that "Zeta" short for? And if it is short for something, then why can't we call you "Catherine Zee Jones"?
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
I'd like to add that misspellings were much more common in earlier times. I have books published in the 1800's which have a much higher mis-spelling rate than your average book of the shelf today.
I didn't know Mark Twain was a KDE developer. Interesting.
Yeah, but if you go down that route, where do you stop? There are two main schools of thought in linguistics - those who believe in a prescriptive role for the study of language (i.e. grammar books dictate what is correct and what is not) and those who believe it should have a more descriptive role (i.e. it describes what is actually in use). Now, if we take the descriptive model to then dictate what is and isn't correct, at what point does one stop subdividing the language into dialects, argots, slang forms, idiolects and so on? What is incorrect in formal business American English in New York may be perfectly fine in the dialect of the Hispanic American living in L.A. - and what is correct in formal business American English may be unspeakable incorrect in formal British English as spoken by the Queen. The only way you can hope to say definitively what is right and what is wrong is by specifying exactly who the speaker/writer is, what their social and cultural background is, and also *when* they spoke or wrote what they did - as language changes dynamically all the time, and cross-pollinates from one area to another.
Flavor is more efficient. Just think of all the download time we'll save when we remove all those extra u's from the variable names.
e di r/englishlanguage.html
All kidding aside, it would be a lot better to drop the unpronounced letters from words.
colour -> color, shoppe -> shop, programme -> program
Faster to type and a lot less confusing to non native speakers. Extra letters just add to the complexity of learning english.
http://www.telespan.demon.co.uk/joke_centre/jok
British spelling makes use of a consistent prefix-stem-suffix system to build words.
this makes it possible to work out general meanings of words if you don't know the exact definition.
consider:
centre
centripetal
centrifuge
--common stem "centr"
theatre
theatrical
--common stem "theatr"
the American spelling may seem simple, but it is very shallow. Individual words may be spelt more like how they sound (or seem to sound), but the relationships between words are lost.
consider the US spelling of "center" with the stem "cent"; this suggests a meaning to do with the number 100.
this is probably why the US comes up with retarded stuff like phonics?
If only it was as simple as British/French rivalry.
... now check that cheque!
The French invented the beret and the military wore it on the left. The British adopted the beret but wore it on the right.
The British proposed which side to the road they will drive. The answer was then clear for the French!
At least they agree on spelling
The British Empire is well know for its history of looting artifacts, like the "Elgin" Marbles and the contents of ancient Egyptian tombs. But what is less well known is its long history of stealing vowels to unnecessarly add to words like flavor and color. These vowels were seized from the Balkans by British soldiers marching across the penninsula to the Crimean War, and never returned.
Just look at a map. The looting of vowels has resulted in place names like Drnis, Brcko, Drvar, Vrbas, Knin, Krsko, Trzic, Trbovlje, Vrsac, and most tragically Krk. The consequence has been some of the bloodiest wars in history, as neighboring ethinc groups killed one another for just enough vowels to be able to pronounce the names of their children.
The madness must stop! The world must unite against the speakers of British English and force them to disgorge the vowels they have stolen. Returning the excess "u"s in the Linux source code is just one small step to addressing the root causes of violence in the Balkans.
Am I missing something? Does this hurt or affect anything but pride?
I'm pretty sure you spelled interesting wrong.
Linux 2.6.0-english and 2.6.0.american-english.
Finally, displaying ads while Linux is booting would be a part of the official kernel. We could get driver support for the "fat fingers" line of keyboards too.
Also, the color scheme could be more patriotic. Red, white and blue consoles and hardcoded American flags in the framebuffer background. These things should be mandatory. Have you got your American flag pin by the way It's so classy even the president got one!
This would sort out the SCO problem too. The rest of the world have much saner judicial systems, so battle it out in the crazy ol'US where it belongs.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
... discussing spelling on slashdot!
et les Shadoks pompaient...
@These vowels were seized from the Balkans by British soldiers marching across the penninsula to the Crimean War, and never returned.@>/i>
this is tired old anti-English propaganda. We did <b>NOT</b> steal these vowels they were purchased in a fair trade. The descendants of the selllers just dont like the deal and are lying to get thier vowels back. Thats just sad we make better use of the vowels anyway.<br>
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
... and I can prove it.
Even the Brits pronounce the dipthong 'ou' correctly in those places where it is correctly spelled ("correct spelling" meaning American English spelling), in words such as 'pronounce', 'house' and 'mouse', and especially 'sour', 'hour' and 'flour'. 'Flour' is pronounced exactly the same as 'flower', and rhymes with 'shower' and 'power'.
The words 'flavor' and 'color' are pronounced differently, without the dipthong, and so of course the letter 'u' doesn't not belong there. You don't pronounce them like 'FLAVE-hour' and 'CUL-hour', so logically and objectively, you don't spell them that way either. Hence even the Brits implicitly admit, every time they utter the words, that they are spelling them incorrectly. QED
(Of course, they still have their funny habit of leaving off the 'r' in those words, saying 'FLAVE-uh' and 'CUL-uh', which is obviously wrong as well. If a word isn't supposed have an 'r', there wouldn't be any 'r'.)
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I live in the west aswell but often find myself in the center of the shopping centre.
it's spelled CowbuoyNeal, you insensitive clod!
The US does not use the 'original' forms - It merely uses one of the early forms. The English language was not homogenous until fairly recently. If you look at the OED, you can find not just 'colour' and 'color' but 'colur' as in 'colurs o sun-dri heu' (from 1300). Besides, if you were going to start using the oldest spellings because they were 'right', you'd have to put the 'thorn' key back on the computer - and it doesn't appear to even be a valid symbol on Slashdot...
The US does not have a offical language. There are many reasons for this, namely when the United states of America was founded there was quite a bit of debate on what would be the language of prefence.
As the United States does not have a offical national language, there is no authority in this reguard. Given the fact that other languages are growning in popularity, namely spanish, but others as well, it may be that American english eventually breaks further away from conventional english uses else where and picks up many more diffrences.
USA has no offical language, has never had a offical language. Therefore I find it quite strange for those who live there to argue with citizens in other countries where there is a offical language and it is english or a offical varient thereof and tell them they are wrong.
Hence, the USA does not speak english, so within the USA you kould torque likey dis and it woz bee toqually okaydoky ause dem ave no language.
The lowest commondenominator is UK English, preferably spoken BBC style. Linus is right.
Actually, the Academie Francaise was started by Richelieu under Louis XIII, two centuries before Napoleon. (unfortunately, Slashdot is stripping my properly spelled acute accents and cedillas).
Oh you damn, precious little argumentative local and international bitches! You're comparing an American 8 inch dick to a British 20.32 centimeter dick.
I don't care if it's spelled flavor or flavour, just as long as Cathy Rogers of Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap says it.
The party's over
That's hardly the worst of the vile sins British chefs have committed against cuisine. Who the fuck would eat pudding made out of blood? Pie made from kidneys? Or pie from fucking hamburger for that matter? And another thing: Vinegar is not a fucking condiment!!!!
Try their food.
Why do care about spelling advice from a guy who can't even pronounce his own name right?
'thorn' key?
The letter 'thorn', which looks like a deformed 'p' was pronounced 'th'. In HTML you can get it by using & thorn; or & #254; in the code (but not in Slashdot comments). As it fell out of use, it was sometimes replaced by a 'y' hence 'Ye Olde Shoppe' on signs.
this guy has applied the patch to preprocessor definitions! yippee: unnecessary-breakage-of-source-compatibiity goodness
Diversity is a good thing, but the American changes are needless and counterproductive.
I tend to agree with the principle of changing colour to color, knife to nife and christmas to slvvsjcoaehf (Blackadder) and some other changes. They make things clear and unambiguous. But then when you have a large collaborative effort like the Linux kernel, and it has been decided to use international (British) English, then STICK to it.
I could care less about comments, but with code, spelling is important (same goes for consistent indentation practices)
I think to clear matters up, we should use Klingon as the de-facto language of variable names....
I think grep and gcc need to be changed.
Just like case-insensitivity I think grep should have a non-strict English match setting. This could do a match on both colour and color if either is found.
Perhaps even an option on the compilers? (But this is more dangerous, and can be acompanied by compiler warnings...)
Diversity is a good thing, right?
You can generally tell what kind of linguist you are dealing with by what kind of books they write. Prescriptive linguists write grammar books. Descriptive linguists write dictionaries.
The descriptive linguists also write studies on the cross-polination you referred to, but they generally get offended when people use their dictionaries to justify clubbing others over the head with their preferred spellings. To answer your question of where to stop, don't. Embrace diversity, recognize its role in defining culture, and don't get so hung up about being "right" or others being "wrong".
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
My guess, posted in the traditional slashdot fashion (IANAAR; IHNRT*A; IDNKWT*IATA), the submitter of this patch wanted a piece of SCO, or the next company to come along. Perhaps he wasn't a coder, or not too much of one, and wanted to be *sure* that his patch would get in. So he rolled a US-style version (which US companies would use), so as to be ready with his lawyer all cocked and aimed.
I tend to think this is not a good idea, of course; only true coders should maintain copyright.
*=silent F
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I mean. Flavour is brittish english. No doubt. But even as i'm an american english speaker, i prefer the brittish version.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Some people are. I wish they would just ignore them. David S Miller should ban these mails (instead of others which are really off-topic but there are no huge debates following either).
DO YOU HEAR DAVID S MILLER?
WHAT IS OFFTOPIC NOW?? HUH?
jerk
As an idea aside, maybe British IP lawyers should sue America for using an unauthorize derivative work - i.e. basing the American languange on English without first licensing the IP. Of course, the damages should be triple because Americans continue to redistribute, even force, the new derivative work on the rest of the world in a Microsoft-esque fashion. Britain, having invented the English language, should be getting royalties from everyone who speaks it, except that if you pay tax in England, you'll be exempt from the licensing fees and the threat of any future lawsuits. Britain should be charging $32 for every person who speaks English, but $699 if they do so in order to run the government. Shit, this is starting to sound familiar...
But seriously, don't kernel developers have better things to do than argue about fscking spelling? Or is this one of those "blow-off-steam" things that happens from time to time?
...right?
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
Not outlawed, nope. I mean, gee, the French have beheaded politicians for less than that. *g*
/. reported on that a while back? You did read the article, didn't you?
What you're referring to is the government's agencies being made to use, of all the commonly used words for email ("email", "mail" and "courriel"), the one that fits in the tongue best.
I thought
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
What follows is the patch to change all the occurences of the word flamewar with flamewaur. ;)
--
I refuse to use
I write and present for a living. My wife for works for an international Investment bank. We DO NOT live in either the US or UK. We live in Switzerland.
What is the English used? American English. My wife even had a document pop up in her email defining what language to use and what words to use. Lo and behold what language dominated? American English, even though the company was not American or British...
The reality is that American English is winning, even among those "common wealth" countires...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
That's beautiful.
Twain really is the best of American writers.
That was classic intercourse!
And if I may be cynical, you first need to learn French.... ;)
BTW my wife is Quebecoise.... We live in Europe and the French always tell her...
Ah oui, la belle province...
She cannot hide her accent at all from the French. They always know that she is Quebecoise. Me having learned Quebecoise makes it DAMM hard to speak to the French.
Ah oui, je voudrais le tart de blue'... The woman looked at me and could not figure out what I was getting at. My wife said, "Myrteil?"....
Oddly enough the French always come up to my wife and I, and say "Salut Tarbar......". They think it is funny. We look at them and go, OK????
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Zees ees a franchement stupide discussion, mes amis, seulement a collective des geeks et philologues could possibly be discussing ze differences between two bastard dialects of ze noble Francais. Zut alors! Tous le monde knows zat ze only correct, la seule bon mot, it is "saveur". Zees half-bred "flaveur" 'owever you want to spell it, it is a monstrosity, a barbaric insolence, en je suis proud zat l'Academie Francais in her wisdom 'as banished eet from ze common speach.
Wat next, I ask vous? Zere is only one true language, un seul, et cela is ze noble French. All other dialects and jargots, grovel before her.
Merci. Bon journee a vous tous.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
English and American should be treated as two separate languages. Spelling is only part of it, so many things have completely different meanings.
Example. If I 'roll a fag' I make a cigarette from tobacco and rolling papers, what about you?
Let America have it's own language it can be proud of, maybe this 'embrace and extend' of our fine English language can stop.
Custom Rules For SpamAssassin
In any case, most of British English will be outdated soon. At least in Europe.
http://www.masquilier.org/republic/election/ Condorcet, Plurality voting and alternative voting enabled bulletin board.
That thread (including the orignal patch) is almost as anal as the KY float in a gay pride parade.
The world according to SComps
"Flavour" is the British spelling, "flavor" is the American spelling.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
f w ll dtch cpl vwls w dnt nd w cn sv lts f bndwdth !
Considering that the English language is a hack of various European languages you shouldn't be surprised that a huge portion of our language was borrowed from French. As for subverting English, if you removed all the "Euro words" you'd have nothing left but a handful of colloquialisms and various names.
America is now the owner of the English language. America bought the copyright and patents for the English language from Novell who purchased them from AT&T who purchased them at a Sothebys auction.
And as for my knowlege of history, it's derived mostly from the Emmy Nominated "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on Comedy Central. I actually can't stand Springer.
This is not (just) a spelling issue... perhaps y'all (is that standard?) missed this email (or maybe no one RTFA):
From: Jasper Spaans [email blocked]
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Change all occurrences of 'flavour' to 'flavor'
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2003 08:52:30 +0200
On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 09:42:37PM -0400, Zwane Mwaikambo wrote:
> > It changes all occurrences of 'flavour' to 'flavor' in the complete tree;
> > I've just comiled all affected files (that is, the config resulting from
> > make allyesconfig minus already broken stuff) succesfully on i386.
>
> Arrrgh! You can't be serious!
Yes, I am bloody serious; this patch might look purely cosmetic at first
sight.. yet, there's a technical reason for at least one part of it. Grep
and see the horror:
$ egrep -ni 'flavou?r' fs/nfs/inode.c
[snip]
1357: rpc_authflavor_t authflavour;
[snip]
VrGr,
--
Jasper Spaans http://jsp.vs19.net/contact/
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I fail to see how this relates to eyeball juices.
I don't know about you, but I can see the resemblance quite vitreously..
(Thanks for letting me get that off my chest, it has been bothering me for a long time.)
word.
..surely it's a matter of taste
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
From what I vaguely remember from the Bill Bryson book "Mother Tongue", the spelling of "colour" as "color" happened in Britain as well in the 18th century. There was a period where it was fashionable to try and "improve" the inconstistencies in English, and the supposedly stray extra vowel was dropped (even though the pronunciation of the first syllable differs to the second - it's more like kull-err). This was, more or less, at the time of the American War of Independence, and after that point the two languages diverged, with the then-current British reductionist fashion holding sway - maybe, in a tiny way, to affirm a linguistic independence from the former colonial power's historical spellings.
Anyhoo - I'm an English (British/European/whatever) web developer of over 8 years and am so indoctrinated with the Americanisms of HTML and its ilk, that when it comes to programming or anything computer related, the spelling of "colour" now appears incorrect, at least with a programmer's hat on. These are, after all, merely symbols to the compiler or intepreter, so their actual spelling is largely irrelevant, as long as it remains consistent throughout the project in question. I would think that the worldwide geek nation must surely consider "color" (when used for code, but not neccessarily comments) to be the de-facto standard by now, or at least anyone who has used a programming language of any sort in the last 20 years probably would...
It's too late for me to die young
Seems a perfectly logical example of using precedent to decide the matter in favour of flavour.
Get with the programme. Acting like its a matter of honour just makes the whole situation humourous.
Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling -- Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be
replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be
part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained
would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2
might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the
same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with
"i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with
Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so
modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai
Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant
letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould
doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a
lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spikingwerld.
Eat at Joe's.
these issues are non-trivial
;)
imho, language should be purely about expressing thoughts. Whether you spell the word 'dreamed' or 'dreamt', I still understand what you're saying. Given that when I'm googling I'm not likely to enter just the one word, does it really matter? tbh, I think I'd be more likely to just search for 'dream', simply because it matches dream, dreamt, dreamed, dreaming etc.
Dammit, typed that too many times. I don't even know if I spelt it right any more.
Offtopic, as a Brit, I don't really think of it as 'British' spelling any more. Like you said, it's a case of US-en, and the rest-of-the-world-en... But as far as I'm concerned, they can spell words any way they like. It's their langauge too, and most geeks can't spell anyway
Warning: May contain nuts
And you should be even less surprised that actually it's "borrowed" from Latin, and what you just wrote tells us only that you're obviously French.
Oh, and don't even try it, French is NOT Latin.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
they lost both the war of 1812 and the revolution.... And since we saved their asses... twice... WWI and WWII .... that makes for two draws in my mind.
Theodore Roosevelt was also the first American to earn a black belt in Judo.
And going the other way, don't forget Jesse "The Body" Ventura's stint as Governor (independant, no less).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Why don't you just spell it "TASTE"
Not only it is both British and US English, it is even old french.
Can't you Americans just say it, TOILET! THUNDERBOX! SHIT-HOUSE! THE THRONE! JOHN! BOGG!
No one says bathroom. Bathroom would be implying that you are going to have a bath or shower.
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
SCO (SCOU?) owns Linux, including spellings.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Linux community needs to analyze what will most effectively "sell" Linux across the world. We need a Public Relations department, but as the budgetary constraints we can just steal ideas from other large companies.
I shall randomly take Burger King . . . hhmmm burger . . . Where was I oh yea . . . They only serve Medium, Large and King size [soda | cola | pop] and [fries | chips]. So if they can redefine the english language we can to.
So for now on we will use the word "Whocutthecheese" instead of "flavor" or "flavour".
It serves two purposes:
1) you can find it with grep.
2) it is longer than the other words. (we can brag that the Linux code it over 100MB is size instead of 50MB!).
A/C
Don't be afraid of the unknown, filter them out...
We are THE SUPERPOWER. Brittish English is so, 18th century. Lorries, Lifts, Bonnets?!? Thats so gay. As in
Q:Is he Gay?
A: No , he's just really Brittish.
I'm not really trying to post flaimbait, but Brittan in the center of anti-Cool. Except for scottland. Scottland rules.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
which I started in the Redhat mailing list back when someone had a query over why Redhat defaulted to A4 over US Letter, then it spawned into:
A4 vs. US Letter
A-looo-me-num vs. Ala-min-e-um
240v vs. 110v
-our vs -or
Driving on the right vs. Driving on the left
New Zealand Accent vs. Australian Accent
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
Search for flavor: 2,740,000 results
Search for flavour: 766,000 results
Clearly flavor is more common.
See my Home Theater
This sort of disagreement can only be resolved with a fork.
So you suggest adopting the philosophers' spaghetti solution ? or do Americans' spell fork differently too ?
...that the insertion of extra vowels is used to indicate that the speaker is Brittish, or at the very least, not from the USA.
In particular the spellings of "flavor" and "color" are used to convey the nationality of the 1st person, much as pronouns are used to convey the gender of the 3rd person.
And of course don't forget that these two words are spelled "flozbit" and "calkak" to indidate Turkish speakers of English.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
First, regarding the main point of my original comment (which was that Webster changed things just for the hell of it) there actually is good information backing this up, as a friend of mine at Stanford University researched the subject for a few months last year. Unfortunately I didn't actually read the research paper in the end (and hence the lack of clarity on the details). I do rember that the jest of the research indicated that Webster made many questionable changes for no substantial reason.
;)
misterpies, The Famous Druid, et al.:
Thank you for the correction, you are of course correct that it was Henry VIII who broke away from the Catholic church. That was a grevious oversight that shouldn't have occured; and thus I learn my lesson about posting when I'm not awake
regarding the driving comment:
Admittedly it was a bit far fetched (I couldn't think of a better off hand example) but I will stand by the logical portion of my orignal comment, but mainly from personal experience. Spending several months a year both in and out of the US, I end up driving both manual and automatic cars in both places. To be honest driving a manual right-hand-drive car is preferable as I (as per the majority of the population) am right handed. I feel that shifting with my left hand while handling the wheel with the right is preferable as I have more control in that arrangement. With the economic comment, it was basically addressed to modern day where it doesn't really make sense (except for Detriot big iron) to produce two, mostly incompatable automobiles. Not only does it require significant investment to cross between the US/Eu markets (as it becomes cost prohibitive to produce and export a small number of cars) but also it produces issues for those that do drive the 'wrong' kind of car in the form of safety issues.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
WOW!
(Late post as the authors has been busy downloading, configuring and compiling 2.6.0-test3 once he saw the OP.)
Billy the Shakes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Something I've never thought of, but does the US have the majority of the worlds English-first speakers? I know US has more than the combined populations of Britain, Australia, and Canada are 60M, 20M, and 30M, respectively. That's only 110M total, which is well less than half the US population. Given that, are there another 160M-odd native English speakers elsewhere? No, India doesn't count, as that might skew things. ;)
Based on that, however, I would say that the US has the bulk of the world's English-first speakers, so I think that "flavor" would *certainly* qualify as common.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
At Pete's Bar and Grill, you'll pay about 10 bucks for a beer, burger and fries. At Petro's Cocktail Grille, you'll pay about a hundred bucks for a tiny glass of white wine and a plate with a single sprig of parsely in some artistically swirled sauce combination.
There are also false "grilles" which still serve beer, burgers, and fries but are cleaner and with better decor to throw you off. You'll find a lot of guys in ties in them.
I'm submiiting a patch to replace all occurances of "bathroom" with "lavatory".
That should be W.C., you ignorant b@$#*$!!!
Actually, in Canada, we use a somewhat inconsistent mix of British and American spellings, ie.:
We must defend the honour of our organization.
Of course, that example is completely contrived, but it illustrates the point: British "honour" instead of American "honor", and American "organization" instead of British "organisation". Most people here are okay with either spelling (us zealots aside ;-) ).
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
> All this story has produced are failed attempts at homour ... I mean humor ... oh dammit ... funniness.
You mean Homer and Foulness.
The difference in American spelling is not only due to isolation from British English, but is also the result of a deliberate effort to simplify spelling by removing those pesky exceptions to the rule. See here for some info.
I vote for the Cowboy Neal option!
Seriously, couldn't they replace "flavor" with "variant"?
It might well be related. Does the phrase 'to be good humoured' have any relationship to the ancient Greek idea of the body containing 4 humours? Quick link here.
After almost every post on this thread, I find my self shaking my head, saying "who cares." Then I realized that I have read four pages of "stuff I don't care about." /. has killed my brain by making me smarter (if not more inquisitive).
As Eddy Izzard pointed out, one is phonically correct the other is cheating at scrabble.
"T..H..R..O"
"0?"
"Yes! and a U"
"U?"
"To prop up the O. And a G"
"G?"
"To give it a 'guh'"
"And an H in case the G falls off"
Having spent some formative years in England, I am allowed to use both. Especially if the extra letters lands me on a double word score.
Cheers!
As much as I prefer the correct -our spelling, you have to go with the Cold Lamper for the final word.
Um,
It was King Henry VIII who broke the Anglican church away from the Roman church.
King James authorized a Bible. Or is that authoriSed?
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Well, I found the European fetish for referring to British English as "proper" English to be objectionable. Words like "proper" are bothersome because they imply superiority, when in reality, the differences in spelling on either side of the Atlantic Ocean are almost all attributable to a lack of standardized spellings prior to the British colonizing North America. (Well, that, and divergent efforts in England and America to rectify the situation after war had separated the two entities politically.)
Still, referring to people who are born and raised in the U.S. as "unfortunate" is probably a bit more overtly inflammatory.
Why bother with "correct" spelling in the first place. English spelling was non-standard for a very large peroid of history.
paladin_tom wrote: Actually, in Canada, we use a somewhat inconsistent mix of British and American spellings, ie.:
:).
We must defend the honour of our organization.
'organization' isn't *really* a US spelling in the way that 'honor' is. It's considered acceptable in the UK, though less common than the spelling with an 's'.
You do, however, write 'tire' for the rubbery things on wheels. I think that's because you don't believe there are people spell it with a 'y', though.
British English also had spelling changes driven by dictionary makers.
i sh _English_Differences
However American English wasn't defined by an Academy in the French sense and it continues to evolve, due to the influences of Hollywood and American popular culture that is the English that will survive.
"Due to the wide reach of US media vis-a-vis the more limited impact of contemporary British culture in the US, knowledge of American English in Britain is more common than the reverse."
"The first American dictionary was written by Noah Webster in 1828. At the time America was a relatively new country and Webster's particular contribution was to show that the region spoke a different dialect from Britain, and so he wrote a dictionary with many spellings differing from the standard. Many of these changes were initiated unilaterally by Webster.
Webster also argued for many "simplifications" to the idiomatic spelling of the period. Somewhat ironically, many, although not all, of his simplifications fell into common usage alongside the original versions, resulting in a situation even more confused than before.
Many words are shortened and differ from other versions of English. Words such as center are used instead of centre in other versions of English. And there are many other variations.
American English has further changed due to the influx of non-English speakers whose words sometimes enter American vernacular. Many words have entered American English from Spanish, etc."
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_Brit
"Henry Sweet predicted in 1877 that within a century, American English, Australian English and British English would be mutually unintelligible, but it may be the case that increased world-wide communication through television, the Internet, or globalization has reduced the tendency to regionalisation. This can result either with some variations becoming extinct (as, for instance, apartment has been gradually displacing flat in much of the world) or that wide variations are accepted as "perfectly good English" everywhere."
I remember seeing BIER in very old Budweiser adverts, from the last century, from the US...
The french word is biere
Go Esperanto!
is, of course, flavxx0rs. But you knew that.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
both discs are round; CDs can be put in a protective (square) tray and FDs can be removed from the tray, showing their disCy roundness. ;-) /dev/disc ...
more seriously, hard disc or hard disk? devfs says
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Here's some fuel for your flamewar:
- Colour
- Favourite
- Flavour
- Offence
- Licence
- Standardise
- Metre
- Centre
- Analogue
- Catalogue
- Doughnut
- Draught
- Encyclopaedia
- Grey
- Honour
- Omelette
- Sulphur
- Tyre
- Aeroplane
- Analyse
- Enrolment
It's a sad day when you post something as simple and innocent as a list of words and just know that you're going to get modded flamebait."Britian and the US"
or as we spell it in britain, "B-R-I-T-A-I-N"
A wise McQuaid once said...
oh... nevermind. Wise? He went the way of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
I find it amusing that someone who claims to have a "right to hate" someone else based on nationality and criticizes the United States for being a nation of idiots can be so fluent in misspellings in the language he claims to defend. Even though you're a dick, your name still requires capitalization, which I did. By that same token, I would expect someone so clearly enlightened to know that even when you are flaming a nation, the rule for capitalization of proper nouns (since first grade, no less) is:
...or is that something that Americans bastardized (bastardised?) as well?
I can tell you that I'm wise enough to know this: If I judged other people the way YOU do, I'd be stupid enough to believe every Canadian is an asshole.
And lastly, I'll be the last one to defend any of our politicians, but that random divergence from your main point only further buries your cause, and lessens any chance of finding you capable of any rational conclusion whatsoever.
So do us all a favour, and shut up.
Mom says my
So folks in the UK have tyres on their autos? Hey, cool, I thought the only difference between British and North American cars was that the Britishones ran on petrol instead of gas! ;-)
Seriously, though, thanks for enlighening me. =)
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
They also have bonnets and boots, rather than hoods and trunks. It's not all just different spelling.
There is no such thing as "international English". In some companies the term has been used for marketing purposes, but its use is spurious. US English and UK "British" English are genuine standards, but there is no international standard. Many users of British English are unaware that US orthography is the preferred form in many nations, not just in the US.
And as for Latin roots, I'm only aware of one Latin-based language that spells it "colour": French. To be more like French is to be less like the world of Latin-based languages, not more like it.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
what a boring and disingenious flamebait.
I just love the way that Americans happily refer to a liquid as "gas". It's almost as good as US periodic tables, with "sulfur" right next to "phosphorus"...
BTW the proper spelling is of course fl4v0r!