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## Grammatical peeves and quibbling

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fectin
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### Grammatical peeves and quibbling

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Post by fectin » Sun Jul 20, 2014 8:15 pm

Hopefully this can help other folks too. Feel free to jump in.
I've been seeing a lot of "different to" constructions recently. Absent some specific exception, I had thought the correct construction was "different from" (because something 'differs' from some other thing, therefor it is 'differ-ent' from whatever).
Most of the folks who use 'different to' do so consistently though, and I notice it especially with folks I know are from Commonwealth nations.
Am I just wrong? Is this an American English issue? What's up here?

> Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.

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fectin
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###

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Post by fectin » Sun Jul 20, 2014 8:20 pm

Another thing, completely unrelated:
The US sometimes sells things to other countries. Sometimes, those things come with documentation. Sometimes we actually have that documentation on hand; sometimes it gets sold, and then we peons have to scramble to actually generate that documentation after the fact. Sometimes there are even innocuous little clauses in the contract demanding, roughly, that documentation be delivered in the Queen's English (i.e. 'colour' vice 'color').
So, uh, apropos of completely nothing, are there resources for translating from American English to British English?
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name_here
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Post by name_here » Sun Jul 20, 2014 8:32 pm

Spellcheckers can be set to American or British, which should handle all those 'u' issues. Dunno for actual word swaps.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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TiaC
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Post by TiaC » Sun Jul 20, 2014 8:36 pm

Search for britpicking resources.

> virgil wrote:Lovecraft didn't later add a love triangle between Dagon, Chtulhu, & the Colour-Out-of-Space; only to have it broken up through cyber-bullying by the King in Yellow.

> FrankTrollman wrote:If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid.

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fectin
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  Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2010 1:54 am

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Post by fectin » Sun Jul 20, 2014 9:03 pm

> TiaC wrote:Search for britpicking resources.

Nice. Thanks; I would never have guessed that one.

> Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.

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Essence
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  Location: Olympia, WA

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Post by Essence » Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:38 am

I write weekly and monthly columns for marketers in the UK, so this isn't something I'm unfamiliar with. I use this list of American words that the UK doesn't use much, and this list of British slang terms to occasionally put in my text to make them more culturally incognito. If I'm feeling really brave, I'll pull something from here, too, but that doesn't seem applicable to what you're doing.
Last edited by Essence on Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
Can the US government be uncorrupted?
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Josh_Kablack
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  Location: Online. duh

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Post by Josh_Kablack » Mon Jul 21, 2014 6:22 am

> Essence wrote:I write weekly and monthly columns for marketers in the UK, so this isn't something I'm unfamiliar with. I use this list of American words that the UK doesn't use much,

Good list.
But as a quibble, I did catch that it misses the Sport/Sports distinction:
Here in 'murika I am into Sports, and my newspaper has a Sports section. On the other side of the pond, those blokes are itno Sport and their papers generally have the same news in the Sport section.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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momothefiddler
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Post by momothefiddler » Mon Jul 21, 2014 12:32 pm

Apparently we had to put the s from Maths somewhere.
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