[SOC] For those of us divided by a common language

[Paul Bartlett]

Well,

English is a bastard language. More words in the vocabulary than any other,
I believe.

There used to be a popular quiz show in the UK called 'Call My Bluff' where
bizarre words were trawled from the Oxford English Dictionary and a panel of
three offered three alternative meanings for each word. The opposing panel
had to pick the right one. The only word I ever recognised straight off was
'shadoof' (spelling?) (a middle eastern water lifter).

English embraces new words readily and with the Internet is rapidly becoming
the 'Lingua Franca' (sic).

About twenty years ago, I worked on word processors. We bought in a
spell-checker from a company in the States. It had two dictionary files:
'English.lex' (American) and 'British.lex' (English). That irritates me to
this day!

Paul :-)

----- Original Message -----
From: "W.B. Cunningham" <wbc at nquisit.com>
To: "SOC1" <soc at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 6:53 PM
Subject: [SOC] For those of us divided by a common language


> kinda interesting
>
> http://www.neh.fed.us/news/humanities/2004-03/speakamerican.html
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