This tongue-in-cheek British PSA encourages Americans to vote for Trump

I don’t know, let me analyze it for a moment.
My small gripe: British pronouncing Arkansas as Are-can-sass and not Are-can-saw.

1 Like

Don’t forget Kansans and Coloradoans doing the same. You know, because of the Ar-kan-sas river (which then changes to Ar-kan-saw in Oklahoma).

5 Likes

Legal is 8.5x14" and never the default, which is Letter, 8.5x11".

4 Likes

The fact is, you can run a direct line of influence from America’s stubborn refusal to standardize measures (including of dates) with the rest of the developed world and Donald Trump.

Weird thing about that statement is that it is only half in jest.

3 Likes

I came at it the other way around. I finally got the hang of British “half eight” but then I started learning German… Now I also have to ask for clarification.

3 Likes

We may have our dates a bit muddled, but at least we drive on the correct side of the road :smile:

4 Likes

Yup, USL is the default on just about every printer, or used to be. Oh the fun of installing a load of new printers only to have the infamous message PC Load Letter come up, and the infuriated user “I have a tray full of letterhead and it won’t print.”

HP printers used to support a size which they called Oufuku (usually rendered as Ofuku Hagaki). It’s 10mm shorter than A5, but other makers tended to call it “200 by 148” for some unknown reason.

1 Like

Regionalisms which happened because of the poor communications of the past along with different linguistic communities, and which are amazingly persistent. The French don’t pronounce Paris properly, for instance. (The English stuck with the old pronunciation while the French changed it maybe 400 years ago.) The English town of Frome retains a spelling and pronunciation which Shakespeare would have recognised - in Julius Caesar someone says “now is it Rome indeed and room enough”, and both words were originally sounded the same.
With conservatism like this, the American Revolution is a recent spat from which the fallout is still being digested.

By bizarre hipsterish coincidence, I adopted this style for adding a date to file names before I knew it was ISO. It just makes sense when you’re trying to sort files by date.

Sure, you can use created by date or modified date. But if you created it on one date, made most of the modifications on a second date and corrected a single typo on a much later date, then it can be really handy to just have a single, officially referenced date in the file name where anyone can see it.

Also ISO just goes great with my generally preferred aesthetic of general-to-specific listings.

3 Likes

Aaaaand…lest we forget. Happy Columbus-Didn’t-Get-There-First (or Do Us Any Huge Favor) Day!

3 Likes

What do other countries consider the proper toppings for hotdogs?

I still sneak it in whenever I can. It just makes sense, reads and sorts naturally. Sorting things in order of dd-mm-yyyy or mm-dd-yyyy is pretty useless. Unfortunately still get complaints and have to change it, but not always.

Ugh! Those are the worst. “of” is ambiguous - which direction is of? It kinda sounds like someone’s shortening “after” to “af’” and being lazy on the vowel, so “quarter af’ six” must mean 6:15, right? No? Maybe they’re shortening “before” through “buffore” to ‘uf’, but it seems like that would retain the r, so shouldn’t it be “of’r” (or just “afore”)? And “quarter six” without the til/past is equally ambiguous. So much quicker, easier, and clearer to just say the time. “five forty five” is the same number of syllables as “quarter of six”, after all.

2 Likes

What day was Ron Kovic born?

P.s. I love Love LOVE daylight savings :heart_eyes:

3 Likes

I’m liking this post as long as you like perpetual DST.

1 Like

[quote=“McGreens, post:38, topic:87112”]
It’s when using numbers that it makes much more sense to put them in order; either dd/mm/yy or yyyy-mm-dd.[/quote]
Which is exactly why I have trained myself to write the three-letter abbrev of the month, rather than the number of the month.

10-Jan FTW. 10-01 (or was that 01-10?) for the fail.

3 Likes

Sorry :frowning:
The whole POINT of DST is to get that bonus as winter turns to spring. Yay!

1 Like

something something cows something curtains…

signed: QLD.

1 Like

Not worth the cost of that miserable loss of daylight we’re heading towards again up here.

Yeah, but then you get an extra hour’s sleep-in! Seriously, it’s win-age all the way down!

1 Like

Mmm. Sorry about Joh B-P. Our bad on that one.

1 Like

Ugh! Those are the worst. “of” is ambiguous - which direction is of? It kinda sounds like someone’s shortening “after” to “af’” and being lazy on the vowel, so “quarter af’ six” must mean 6:15, right? No? Maybe they’re shortening “before” through “buffore” to ‘uf’, but it seems like that would retain the r, so shouldn’t it be “of’r” (or just “afore”)? And “quarter six” without the til/past is equally ambiguous. So much quicker, easier, and clearer to just say the time. “five forty five” is the same number of syllables as “quarter of six”, after all.

Well, “quarter of six” basically means “a quarter off six”, where “off” means “(away) from”. “Off” and “of” used to be the same word. Even though “off” came into use, the phrase “quarter of six” (or “five of six”, etc. ) remains for reasons only linguists can explain.

1 Like