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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!
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.
"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.
Its because of aluminium poisoning. Sorry, aluminum.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
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.
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."
The source there is the American Heritage Dictionary as someone else pointed out. A look at the OED reveals something very interesting: the spelling flavor may be older than flavour. If I read the entry and help sections right, "flavor" was introduced in the 14th century while "flavour" wasn't around until the 15th.
Here are the relavent lines from the entry:
"Forms: . 4- flavor, 5 Sc. flewoure, 5- flavour. . 6 Sc. fleoure, fleure, fleowre, fleware, -ere, 8 Sc. flaur."
and the help file:
"Variant forms are the alternative spellings in which a word has been found over the centuries. Centuries are given in abbreviated form in the Second Edition. For instance, 4-8 should be read as 14th to 18th centuries, and 1 means before 1100 AD."
The above is the best guess as to what the numbers mean in the entry itself, but that would mean that the other forms which look like Old English would be more recent. Also, in the quotations given "flavour" precedes "flavor" in time. So I'm confused.
Anyway, the entry for "favour, favor" says "As in other words with the same ending, the spelling with -our is preferred in the British Isles, while in the U.S. -or is more common."
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).
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
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:
Of course I doubt the literacy of the rest of the 506 million is as high as 97%.
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.
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.
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"