It’s also frowned upon by the people of Scotland, today. And when deciding what to call people, the opinion of the people in question may be considered important.
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Of course, and I’m not arguing for anything else. My initial post re Galbraith’s book was a comment on how terms change over time and place.
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It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I interpret the red squiggly underline to mean “this word is not in my dictionary” and don’t ascribe any judgment on rightness/wrongness. But I can see how others might take it that way.
When I worked with people whose job it was to write helpful messages for the computer to display, they always grappled with how to tell the user they had done something wrong without making it seem like they had done something wrong. The joke was to display an error message that read, “Oops! One of us made a mistake, and it wasn’t me!”
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Not just the immigrants. The people recording their names would write them differently, too. Surnames and given names. Makes genealogical searches interesting (and explains why soundex was developed) when the 1881 census has a different spelling from the 1871 one…
Year of birth can wander all over, as well.
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My pre-20th century ancestors refused to age 10 years every 10-year census!
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