I have to admit, I love writing my blog. And of course, even more I love getting comments from those few who read it. But I have a quandary. Many of my readers, or at least those who read and comment, are from North America. And this means that we are separated by a common language.
Knowing my readers, I find myself tempted to write vacation rather than holiday, though I usually can’t bring myself to betray my own language in that way. (It’s bad enough that I have to adopt a quasi-American accent as soon as I land in LAX so that people can understand me.) I stick resolutely to shop rather than store, use autumn because it seems so much more romantic than fall, and ironically, in this much more secular country, I use Christmas rather than Holidays.
I stubbornly and pedantically stick to the spellings I learned at school. Occasionally I wonder if my readers think that I have dyslexia or can’t spell or type, as I stick to programme with two ms and an e, centre and centred, colour and labour, and judgement rather than judgment. I have a horror of –ize rather than –ise, even though the former is creeping into New Zealand English, and putting down roots. (I blame MS Word spellcheck with US English as the default). And of course we use mum, not mom, and coriander not cilantro, rocket not arugula. Recently I was reminded of the US usage of check rather than cheque, and learned of practice rather than practise.
As appalled as I am at the state of both written and spoken English in New Zealand today (it is one of the few issues on which my 87-year-old mother-in-law and I agree), I remain thankful that we have yet to adopt gotten, and that knitted is still the past tense of knit.
I have however felt forced to adopt the Oxford comma, despite it not being in common usage here in New Zealand, after reading Craig rant about it some time ago. I suspect though that my usage is inconsistent; it doesn’t come naturally.
Variations in spoken accents are frequently a joy to me, especially when meeting people from other lands or even other backgrounds. So despite the misleading title of this post, I will refrain from commenting on pronunciation differences, other than this one point. I wondered recently, when I responded to Lali on her blog, whether she pronounces it the way I pronounce it (to rhyme with Mali), with a long “A” as in Laahli, or if she pronounces it to rhyme with Sally. I hope someone will enlighten me.
Right on! –or should I say Cheers! — on your feelings about words. I am the same, and a word, a spelling, or a pronunciation is important. Words just need to be correct, there are no two ways about it. For whatever reason, when writing prose I avoid names that end in “y,” but don’t have a real reason for that. I love surnames that contain double letters. I never knew that until two years ago when I did NaNoWriMo for the first time and found it heady to construct my characters, names and all. Feel free to connect to my blog.
LikeLike
So much fun here. Do you say Mali to rhyme with Molly, or Mail-ee? I always assumed the former (as I assume Eulalia, being Spanish in origin, also uses the Lolly pronunciation–but what do I know, I’m from the midwest).
I find myself using “autumn” more in my blog because I have overseas readers. Fall, having two meanings, could be confusing. But I always SAY “fall.”
Knit is, I believe, an older construction than knitted–it is becoming more regular.
I watch so much BBC (with subtitles when I can so I can catch slang better) that your blog has never tripped me up.
LikeLike
Another question: do you use check as a verb, as in “Check my math?” Is it a word NZ uses?
LikeLike
Check, as used here, can be a noun (I signed the check) or a verb (Please check my math). Yep!
LikeLike
BUt what about cheque?
LikeLike
Yes, she pronounces it Lolly, like Molly, which is how I pronounce Mali, assuming the country.
I believe in staying true to one’s spellings (although I know they can change over time). It might jar me to see you suddenly use American spelling. It also helps me remember where you are.
I have, however, asked a certain client to no longer have me proof their UK catalogs, because there is no search and replace in the proofs they send me, and although I can catch British spellings when I see them, I have more trouble remembering to change every incidence of American spelling to British when it’s appropriate. (And really, people—how hard would it be to send me a file that I could search and replace?)
LikeLike
We use check as a verb, never as a noun – that’s where cheque comes in.
Now, I obviously pronounce lolly very differently from you, so it doesn’t really help me! Mah-lee, like the country, with a long A, think Boston accent for “park the car in the yard” without the r’s.
IB, I thought I knew most of the American spellings, but I’m regularly surprised.
No search and replace? Argh.
LikeLike
It’s all good either way for me. There are some UK phrases I use because they are fun such as “I’m feeling peckish” or “having a kip”* but most of all I stick with my native language. When someone does use the British spellings or pronunciations I simply figure they’d just been there or their parents are from the UK.
I’ve never used “me stomach thinks me throat’s been cut” but I sometimes think it.
LikeLike
Imagine the asterisk is just before the last sentence in my comment and I’ll be a happy woman.
LikeLike
When I think long /a/ I think of the a as in paint. In my dialect, the aaah sound in Mali is the same as the L-affected short /o/, like doll or Molly…
This is fun.
LikeLike
I’m walking about saying “lah-lee” and “dah-lee” instead of lolly and dolly.
When we all get together, do you think we’ll understand each other, or we’ll need white-boards or pen and paper to communicate?!
Dona. I love that last phrase! And I do use “peckish” at times, and though I probably don’t talk about “having a kip” it’s quite commonplace here.
LikeLike
Funny, I came back here this morning in a panic because I was thinking you probably don’t pronounce Molly the way I do and that I should have just said yes, Laaaaahli, exactly! Even with me, there’s a subtle difference between Molly and Mali, Mali being a tad more open.
LikeLike
I say, be yourself–one of the lovely things about this blog-world we live in is that it is so much smaller than the physical globe. in my case, being myself means often spelling colour with the u and other words (can’t remember which, off the top of my head) with a gratuitous e at the end, just because, as one of my crushes in high school wrote in my yearbook, it adds more flavour.
As I read, I find myself imagining what y’all might sound like; Mali, like my friend Mike even though he’s from a different town; Indigo, like my friend from New Hampshire in college. I’m sure, when we are all in one room I will discover myself to have been entirely wrong.
LikeLike
Being so cosmopolitan, I tend to mix American and British spelling and vocabulary haphazardly. I always use the “u” in colour, for example. But I am a firm convert to “ize”.
LikeLike
Lisa: And really, I’m from Maryland!
LikeLike