Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
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.
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...
Its because of aluminium poisoning. Sorry, aluminum.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
I don't see how CowboyNeal would be any better then flavor or flavour.
Hello, this is Leenoos Toorvahlds and I spell flavor, f-l-a-v-o-u-r.
This sort of disagreement can only be resolved with a fork.
signed,
BSD
Use Python
1.Flavore
2.Flevor
3.Flirst Porst
4.PROFIT!!!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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.
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.
Not too bad, what was real fun was coding with my best friend, way back in grade 11 with pascal... He has an easier time working with var names that are not descriptive but just plaid different and can be logical units in your head. It was small code so we could bacially keep track of everything in our heads... but having lines of code that read:
if ( pig > cow ) then horse;
makes for fun codeing.. and a global search and replace right before handing it in makes for good marks... heh(that and the fact that we taught more of the class then the teacher, but she still did a good job with the other students, it's just that there were more of us then her)
I suspect multiple spellings of the same word would have the opposite effect, and i have had issues with it just lately while working with some toolkits that don't use standardized spellings...
I like the solution some have thou, just define the function twice with the same name! If you got the mem for that, it solves a few problems...
Anyway, enough of my ranting...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
...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.
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."
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
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
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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).
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.
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/
while(homies.down)
{
bustcap;
punk(whitey);
bustcap;
bustcap;
}
bite my glorious golden ass.
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
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.
No, it's called "English" as opposed to "American".
They speak English in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. and in America, they speak American. Also they pronounce the letter z wrong. it's Zed, not Zee. And they think Kraft dinner is Kraft mac & cheese (and food, for that matter), and the beer tastes like watered down piss. etc.
Differences in countries are stupid to debate about, because there's no right answer, just differences.
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.
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:
Or should that be horrour?
Perhaps you missed it, but Scotland became part of the British Union in 1707.
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.
Of course I doubt the literacy of the rest of the 506 million is as high as 97%.
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
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?
You think that's funny, but the second I discover the 5th fundamental force, I shall name it the nucular force!
I shall set physics back decades.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
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.
Google says:
Eminem - 2,230,000
Mozart - 1,970,000
Burger - 1,670,000
Caviar - 575,000
Piss - 2,750,000
Chardonnay - 742,000
Your point?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
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).
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?
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"
"Flavour" is the British spelling, "flavor" is the American spelling.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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
In my first job straight out of college, it was my first time working in a group of programmers with source control and the like.
I was running into issues that variable names that I was deciding on for my code were occasionally conflicting with reserved words or other people's variables and such (obviously later fixed with a better coding standard that we all had to follow... as I recall, the group in India at the time still ignored it).
As a result, I wrote pretty much all of my code using swears.
My coworkers found it hilarious when I had to give demonstrations of it to groups, or show women in the office how it works.
eg: "fuckMeInTheGoatAss gets passed two variables, here you can see it is taking iShitEater and sCockSmoker - it will return a string, which will then get passed on to easySlut...."
After I left the company, I heard the fellow that took over my code found it both amusing and annoying.
Anytime I can annoy someone, then I consider my life just that much more fufilling.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
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
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.
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!
Why bother with "correct" spelling in the first place. English spelling was non-standard for a very large peroid of history.
is, of course, flavxx0rs. But you knew that.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere