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The Mismatched 'MythBusters'
biohack writes "Most fans of the MythBusters would agree that the two hosts of the show, Adam and Jamie, are 'diametrically opposed in every aspect of their lives'. The Christian Science Monitor story about the MythBusters explores the connection between the backgrounds of the hosts (who knew that Jamie had a degree in Russian literature?) and their creative differences on and off camera." From the article: "It took Hyneman a of couple years to feel comfortable talking in front of a camera, let alone to strangers on the street. 'You have to remember that I'm a guy who is happiest in a dark room just thinking,' he says. 'I'm not a sociable person. I don't like to talk.' Savage, on the other hand, is outgoing. They're clearly the Oscar and Felix of myth busting ... 'Jamie is all about total, complete, and utter control. Thinking first and then acting. Adam is about acting first and then thinking.'"
*sigh*
/'meethayn/
/'paytnt/
methane
patent
from an Aussie dictionary. The narrator's an Aussie, using an American accent. It's not mispronunciation, it's just not the American pronunciation of those words. Patent and Methane with short vowel sounds would be considered mispronunciations here. It's an *Aussie* show, with American hosts and locations.
I wash mah-self with a rag on a stick.
"PAY-TENT, PAY-TENTLY, PAY-TENTS"
= 0&y=0 I see that you say patent like, pat-ent, which is fine I guess, makes more sense from the way it's spelt. But really, the US is a treasure trove of horribly mangled english words.
That is how we say it in Australia, and it's how it's said in England, where the word comes from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=patent&x
I happy that you at least get one example of hearing a word pronounced in a way that you don't like, we get FAR more US media here than you get Australian/English media, and we cringe A LOT!
For anyone who is even remotely interested, Kari Byron in FHM
Prescription glasses made of polycarbonate are fine instead. I work for an engineering department and the rule is safety glasses at all time in labs, unless you wear normal glasses. Believe me, our building manager is a stickler, he wouldn't let us do it if it weren't kosher (we are a government institution and all that).
You'll notice when there's a larger hazard they either put it behind a shield or don more protective gear. However for normal things like soldering or machining, standard glasses are fine.
Also you have to understand that OSHA regs are to protect employees from employers primarily. It's to make sure your employer can't force you to work in unsafe conditions without proper gear. They don't mandate you follow them yourself if you are self employed (which Jamie is). The reason they force OSHA stuff on us isn't because they are worried the cops will come and arrest us for not following it, but because they worried we'd get hurt and sue them and/or they'd get fined.
That is how we say it in Australia, and it's how it's said in England, where the word comes from
;-)
Where the word comes from?!?! Words don't come from places, they come from people. There is no geographic affinity to a word any more than you would expect a child to genetically diverge from his parent merely because he moves away.
This is one of my pet peeves when discussions of "proper" English come up. The British isles do not have some kind of magic authority because of being the place where English evolved from some old Germanic dialects with a heavy influence from the Normans. That's as absurd as saying people in Africa are closer to 'original' humans because humans evolved there. Only it's more so since languages tend to change more *slowly* in colonies and such.
Wait, I have a better example for people on Slashdot: A software engineering team at company A develops a large complex system. They split, with half the team going to a start-up, company B, taking a copy of the system (let's say it's open source, so no license issues) with them. 30 years later all the people from the original team have retired and handed over their work to their respective replacements. Both companies have developed their respective copies of the system further and continue to do so though the original developers are long gone. Is the version maintained at Company A the more "correct" version merely by virtue of Company A being "where it came from"?
Specifically, in the case of English, the dialects spoken on the British isles have been very heavily influenced by the mainland European languages, which has led to e.g. the soft "r" at the end of syllables in most British dialects (Irish English is one exception). The "r" used in most American dialects (Boston being a famous exception), is actually closer to "original English", and is the way Shakespeare probably pronounced it.
That doesn't mean that one is more correct than the other since there are also examples which go the other way, it just shows how absurd it is to treat natural languages as if they had a pedigree, or as if they were the implementation of an ISO standard.
-chris
P.S. Oh, and the word 'Patent' doesn't come from England, it comes from Rome, so we should actually ask a Roman how to pronounce it, right?
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