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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?
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!
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.
Very common misconception.
Unfortunately, sir, you are incorrect. Up here in Canada, as you put it, centre is always spelled -re unless one is referring to an object in the United States.
We still centre our sights on targets, albeit without handguns. Americans are the only ones who center anything.
As far as objects go, yes, Med Centre remains as such, although, the Kennedy Space Center is spelled in the American fashion.
Urban Detail
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.
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?
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.
Then why don't you spell it as "about a yard"?
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