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Links for 2006-04-05

7 replies on “Links for 2006-04-05”

“Why isn’t ‘drought’ spelled just like ‘route'”
Why should it be? (Answer: because they rhyme in American English)
“Where” and “were” are homonyms in much of northern England; should they be spelt the same? Should “there” be spelt “they’re”? Or “their”? Should “heir” be spelt “air”? And “our” “hour”? (Answer: no!)
Arbitrarily changing spellings like this would lead to more confusion.
The Americans have already done it once anyway – removing “U”s and changing French-originated “re”s to “er”s, so that “liter” is pronounced “leet-er” and not “lighter”, which makes no sense whatsoever to me.
Written English is not a phonetic transcription of spoken English – lots of people who can speak very competently are hopeless at written English – spelling, punctuation and grammar particularly. The International Phonetic Alphabet is for phonetic transcriptions when they are needed.
English is a mess. Trying to make it not a mess, so it’s easier to learn, would stop it being English. It would just make it easier to learn English wrongly, and that’s easy enough already.

I’m actually binging on Firefly for the first time (Woolies is selling the box set for ¬£27.99 right now), and have Serenity queued up to watch straight after. IT IS SO AWESOME. I have no idea how I missed it.

I’m glad I fall into the last category of MacBook Pro owners… I only ever get blissful silence!
…excet when the processors are getting really hammered, and the duvet is preventing heat wicking away from the underside, then a discrete fan kicks in. But I accept that as a small price to pay for being able to play WoW in bed. 🙂

And we can’t forget when the US bombed Libya with aircraft based in the UK. Some people in the States cancelled visits to Britian because of fear of reprisals.
Most Americans are not that thick and have a good concept of risk but I’m guessing the school board are not able to quantify risk.

Upon reading the article about people in Florida being too scared to go to London, I find that the article is really about *one* high school in Florida that doesn’t want to send their band to London. This is completely not what I expected given your lead in.
I’m also curious as to the data that supports your additional evidence of US travel to Britain decreasing during the Gulf War. Lots of economic factors affect travel including recessions (I believe there was a mini one in the US during the early 90s) and exchange rates. It would be hard to isolate the Gulf War as the sole independent factor for decreased travel of US citizens to Britain — although it might be possible for the Gulf War to cause economic factors that were the real culprit for decreased travel.

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