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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.
flavor vs. flavour.
Next!
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.
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.
DAMN that american spelling!!!
Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
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
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...
Flavor
eg. "These FREEDOM FRIES have a great flavor!"
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
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...
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.
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=
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"
You clearly haven't looked at the Windows API. At least having consistent and recognizable spelling is an occasional topic of conversation in the Linux development process. (The changes that are going in involve things like "foo_flavor_t *foo_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
tyhere was a humorous discussion involoving the difference between :
license and licence
... hi bingo
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!
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 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
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.
As you can see, one part of this header is spelled with a u and the other without. This could create some developer confusion.
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
Clearly it should be water closet. Hang on while I whip up a patch to change every occurrence of 'toilet'
;-)
I think you have a problem with toilet water
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.
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).
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?
Besides, if it weren't for the US, you'd probably be spelling it '(das) Aroma' anyway.
:)
And if it weren't for the US, we'd all be driving a BMW or Mercedes. Hey, wait a sec...!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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/
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.
Uh... there is something on the order of 506 million English speakers on Earth. Nearly everyone who lives outside of the USA who speaks the language writes English closer to the British orthography than they do to the American.
This doesn't make either "standard" per se, but, since the study of language is the study of trends, it's safe to say the trend in English is toward a British style of spelling and not an American one.
(I mean, not all of those countries follow exactly the British. Canada, for instance, is about half/half American/British--words like "fetus" & "maneuver" in the American style, with words like "centre" and "colour" and "theatre" in the British).
If you 506 million is right, with 260} of them in the US, that still gives us a majority, albeit not a large one.
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
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...
Linux was made to serve the needs of developers who make it. If you read it you see they are just having fun. The fact so many linux people take the "omg what will everyone think of this!" attitude means you need to adopt the BSD attitude. calm down and repeat after me, "what the world thinks does not matter". Remember even if some user thinks what a bunch of idiots linux will still go on.
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...
i still say "lorry" and im only 18 :)
and the english version of the language aint confined to england
it covers pretty much every area of the world that speaks english other than america
making it the majority
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.
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?
Perhaps you missed it, but Scotland became part of the British Union in 1707.
I'm pretty sure consistency isn't a word that can be accurately attached to any version of the English language. They are as many inconsistencies with American spellings:
Tor guides?
The forth in line?
norishment?
etc...
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?
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.
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
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.
Of course I doubt the literacy of the rest of the 506 million is as high as 97%.
Where are those mod points when you need them?
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)
Yeah, convince yourself that petty little arguments don't go on in the development of proprietary operatings systems. Your post is truly inane.
XML causes global warming.
I wonder if Nasa has lost any mars missions over color / colour conversions 8)
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
Speaking as a Canadian, There is no way you can say we speak British english, it ain't even close with the exception of a few spellings. For example metre instead of meter, etc, but as far everything else goes we speak much more Americanly than Britishly.
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.
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?
I say lorry, and so do most other Brits that I know.
If you check Mr. Shakespeare's manuscripts, you'll find color, not colour,
As Shakespeare supposedly spelled his own name in 27 different ways (Shakespear, shakespere etc), I don't think he's a useful guide.
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
It actually started as Alumium, but Sir Humphrey Davy (who first named it) for some reason then changed his mind and called it aluminum. The Brits (and as far as I understand, the rest of the English speaking world outside of the US) decided to use aluminium because it fitted better with everything else that he'd named (magnesium, barium, calcium etc).
And how can you argue that British English is getting more quaint (attractively old-fashioned) and then point out that the the US actually uses the old-fashioned spelling?
If you actually checked your facts before spouting off, you'd know that the discoverer of aluminium named it "alumium". The IUPAC then gave it the name "aluminium" to bring it into line with other elements (you know, sodium, potassium, etc. - gee, there doesn't seem to be any others that end in -num), and the US used this spelling until 1925 when the American Chemical Society had a fit of contrariness and decided to use "aluminum" (please note that the IUPAC spelling has always been aluminium).
Oh, by the way, if you check back before Shakespeare, centre, colour, etc. were spelled the right way. It's just that at the time the USA was formed, the irregular -or forms were in vogue.
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?
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
As Shakespeare supposedly spelled his own name in 27 different ways (Shakespear, shakespere etc), I don't think he's a useful guide.
I think that's because "Shakespeare" was not a single person.
Though admittedly that's debatable
it's spelled CowbuoyNeal, you insensitive clod!
The ACU has disagreed with IUPAC on other names. For example, Seaborgium was not to be used by IUPAC as an element name because Glenn Seaborg was still alive (it's in the rules). However, the ACU felt this wasn't a good reason.
Eventually IUPAC gave in, indeed before he died. Not sure if they've changed their rules as a result.
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...
Of course I doubt the literacy of the rest of the 506 million is as high as 97%
97% is pretty much par for the course for a modern western society. I think the world's highest is 98% (In South Korea - Partly explained by the fact that they have probably the best designed alphabet in the world)
try to find a Brit who still says "lorry" instead of "truck" and doesn't remember WW II first hand
actually, I use both, but then I also use the word billion when I mean 1,000,000,000,000, the american billion being a milliard of course.
dave
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
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
Add to that places like Indian where it's the official second language (as it's a common ground in a country with several languages) and you can guarantee it uses British English spelling.
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!
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.
yeah, he was 27 different people all with similar names.
William Shaxper, William Shakespere and old Bill Shakspear all got together and said " wow guys, we've all got names that are a bit, you know, alike. we should form some kind of writing syndicate, we'll be famous!" (or should that be 'famos'?)
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
Are you "literate" if you talk in 13375p33k and emoticons? 'Cos if not, how the hell can you get a rating that high?
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.
Black pudding -yes
Steak & kidney pie- yes
beef & onion (?) pie - yes
Vinegar as a condiment -yes
But you've missed my favourite...pie & mash
(please brace yourself)
a minced beef pie served with mashed potato covered in liquor (a white sauce made with parsely and eels {yes the fish}) - add the usual condiments - black pepper and vinegar, preferably chilli vinegar.
Stunningly popular delicacy on the manor...
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
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.
from what I heard everyone used to drive on the left but when napoleon conquered europe he wanted to demonstrate his power so made everyone switch. Thats why certain colonies of countries which drive on the right, drive on the left eg Indonesia (drive on left) was a dutch colony (drive on right). dunno why the US chaned. maybe to stick it up the brits.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
..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
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?
I think the general consensus is that the country the language originated in gets to set the official spellings. I believe the French spoken in Quebec differs from that in France, but I wouldn't claim that anywhere other than France was standard French
(try to find a Brit who still says "lorry" instead of "truck" and doesn't remember WW II first hand)
Most people I know. We even have a simple tongue twister about it here: "Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry". Now repeat. As fast as you can.
What is more, American English has the original forms
No idea where you got that idea from - English has evolved over many hundres of years from Old English through Middle English to Modern Engllish. Believe me, neither current British English nor American English look anything like original spellings. In fact, the concept of having standard spellings is quite recent (only a few hundred years old).
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!!!
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.
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.
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"?
Ah well. That was obviously a bit of Korean tourist propaganda then.
Funnily enough, Americium is spelled with the -ium ending too.
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.
Oh, and common use in the late 1800s/early 1900s USA was "Aluminum", which was the real reason for the official change by US the chemists, not "contrariness", though it is true that the US was quite unhappy with Europe in this period.
You mean like Platinum or Molybdenum or Lanthanum? (Or Stannum, though for IUPAC that's an alternate name for Tin, not the preferred name.) There are more -nium endings than -num, but -num is certainly far from unprecedented.The real fault for the confusion lies with Davy. If he'd chosen a spelling and stuck to it, whatever it was would have been used by everyone. For example, Lanthanum was named in 1839, but the discoverer chose a single spelling and stuck with it- so everyone agrees on that spelling.
Well of course it's flamebait, I spoke against the church of Linus!
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Imagine if Intel did it that way;
Pentum
Itanum
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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."
Nono, you miss the point. Different people, who couldn't spell the name they were told to use the same way.
I'm only hypothesising here, maybe he was just one person, maybe his plays really do have more depth than they appear to have, I don't know, may even remind myself to read some different ones to get a better idea. Still, it's a possibility.
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.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."
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"...