Re: [Lingo] British English

[CL <az.4tlug@example.com>]

On 02/04/2011 07:44 PM, Lyle H Saxon wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 11:49 AM, CL<az.4tlug@example.com>  wrote:
> > Some of the other stuff made the "Flashman" series a lot more fun to
> > read ... and I was fortunate to have had a ninth-grade English teacher
> > who took me aside and said "Either spell it one way or the other.  I
> > don't care which.  Just pick one way to spell and stick with it."
>
> So which way did you pick?

The one that paid the highest dividends at the time, of course.  What 
that teacher taught me was to be consistent in the form I chose and not 
switch back and forth within the same article.  It works well right up 
to the point where I have to remember which countries have a Labor Party 
and which ones have Labour ...

In the "old" days, publishers like Haynes and EMAP in the UK, Ziff-Davis 
and Petersen in the US, and Schraeder und Partner in Germany paid about 
20% less for articles that required conversion to the local form of the 
English language than for those that were already mostly there.  The 
Germans preferred US English for translation into Hochdeutsch (which I 
found strange because British seems to be grammatically closer to 
German), but I could mostly translate articles myself and they'd clean 
it up -- and they'd pay a month earlier if you did the bulk of the 
translation yourself.

Australians are the most difficult to write for because they can't seem 
to agree on spelling conventions from month-to-month and fight over it 
more than Canadians who mostly seem to want to be American west of 
Winnipeg and British east of Thunder Bay.  I blame Rupert Murdoch.  Then 
again, I blame Murdoch for everything I don't like about the publishing 
game.  Well Murdoch and Twitter ... and blogs ... and Amazon's 
self-publishing service ... they've done for writing what the hand-held 
video camera did to cinematography ... (falls to floor frothing at the 
mouth and kicking blindly)

--
CL