MEW 332

I live in a house called Badgers Sett. Or should that be Badger's or Badgers'? Depending, I suppose, on whether Brock lived there as a bachelor or with his family? So when I came to make a house nameplate for the bottom of the drive, I went back to the earliest document I have relating to a previous property transfer, a legal document from around the 1950s. I found all three spellings in the same document. So I left out the apostrophe to match an existing sign on the house itself. This also matches the official Royal Mail listing for it - whether right or wrong...

Still, if it had to be one of the other, I would rather be burgled than burglarized!

Joneses in that phrase is a plural, not possessive.

I live on Offa's Road - but the NHS and various other official departments omit the apostrophe. Not what one expects from a government manned by the products of our public schools.

Of course, e-bay misses the apostrophe too, as you might expect.

Cheers, Tim

True enough, but that doesn't stop it being a perfectly good name for the cafe that avoids the apostrophe debate, which was the point

Ah yes, from Bill Waggledagger's Julius Cæsar, Act 1, Scene 2 .

Or "omnia mihi græca sunt" as my Latin teacher put it.

George

So is Nealeb a badger?

The best example of municiple illiteracy near me is STANNES CLOSE. Presumably it should be St. Anne's Close, but it might be named after someone called Stannes. I'm so tempted to get out the stick on punctuation kit.

While we are on the subject of spelling, grammar and the origins of words.

This site accepts catalog but not catalogue.

It likes center but not centre.

While I know I make mistakes with my spelling, all the right letters but not necessarily in the right order. This does little to ease my frustration at getting the words wrong. Especially when the computer does not recognise / recognize, (there's another), the right spelling.

Funnily enough it will accept color and colour, gage it won't, but gauge it will.

I had thought we are on American spelling and not English, but the last example above blows that out of the water. Yet with all the in depth discussions above, I have not seen anyone else point this out during the post.

Moderators please, for my sanity can you sort this one out.

Regards

Gray,

The forum's proprietary spell-checker is one of it's endearing features, and can't be fixed. Dates to the early Internet before Browsers could do spell-checking, and has more than it's fair share of flaws. Defaulting to US English on a British website is just its first eccentricity.

Everyone in the know leaves the forum spell-checker switched off! Instead, Browser spell-checker plug-ins do a much better job, and they work on all websites. How they are installed depends on the browser. I have Firefox with the 'British English Dictionary (Marco Pinto)' extension installed from 'Settings'.

Pretty sure new forum doesn't have a built-in spell-checker - modern software expects the browser to do it. Firefox will spell-check in New Zealand or Canadian English if that's my wish.

Dave

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the info, but thus far I have been unable to dis-arm the spell checker. I will just have to wait until the changeover.

Regards

Gray,

In the editor, try clicking the button marked 'ABC' and then 'Disable SCAYT'.

If that doesn't work, you may have a mis-configured Browser checker. As all Model Engineers know, nothing is ever easy...

Dave

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Dysfunctional might be a good descriptor !

**LINK**

https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/77189/prunus-domestica-cambridge-gage-(d)/details

MichaelG.

Hi Dave,

The ABC button showed "Enable SCYAT", which would leave one to assume it was disabled. However I enabled it and then disabled it, then hey presto it now works properly.

Thanks for that, but I expect the reduction in stress levels will be short lived.

Regards

Gray,

Hi Michael,

As usual with this site one learns something new every day, and I do love plums.

The word gage sits in my brain from the days working at Rank-Xerox. The build sheets from the USA had to be re-written in UK English to suit the assembly staff. Gage and Color were frequent alterations and it was this job that put me off office work.

Regards

Gray,

I had 3 colleagues who'd been laid off by Xerox when times changed. They'd all enjoyed being 'Xeriods', and are probably still calling themselves that!

My dear old dad was entangled in converting US English into British English, and made heavy weather of 'Earth' and 'Ground'. Either his employer had a low opinion of their workforce, or their electricians were extremely thick, or perhaps just a bunch of old-fashioned jobsworths!

In my youthful experience Earth and Ground were synonymous, and I expected to everyone to be keen to explore Vcc, Vee, Vss and other mysteries. Not so apparently: any electrician who read the word 'Ground' was expected to have a nervous breakdown.

That the manuals described an exceptionally complicated system seemed not to matter. My theory is the boss men focussed on the only thing in the manuals they understood - Americanisms - and wasted everybody's time by fixing an irrelevant problem.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 23/09/2023 11:55:14

Would like to do the same but can't find the editor?

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It is visible as the top two rows when you are composing a post

MichaelG.

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Edited By Michael Gilligan on 23/09/2023 14:02:21

Thanks Michael, on the ball as usual.

Hi Dave,

Taking us a little of post, the word "breakdown" was never used in the Radiotherapy Centre. When the machines went wrong they were reported as "Fallen Over". When I first heard the expression I had visions of the Radio Therapy machine in the bunker lay on its side.

A far cry from my days with Xerox.

Regards

Gray,