A PostCSS plugin for people who prefer to write English properly | Hacker News Reader

A PostCSS plugin for people who prefer to write English properly

github.com

84 pointsjanpot53 comments

There is a sweet spot to being the languge underdog. In the UK we've borrowed 'program', 'dialog', 'analog', 'disk' etc for computers, but retain the British for non-computer uses. And, amusingly, we can tell the difference between 'router' and 'router' by pronounciation.

It seems software has become far more prescriptive of late. Although had autocorrect in Word 97(?) and smartphones, recently MacOS and Google have been aggressively rewriting text as you type. It's gone from "did you mean the American version?" to "I've changed it, don't worry". And not everyone has the wherewithal to configure their locale properly.

I see this as a significant form of cultural erasure over the coming years. Given what we've forced on the world historically, I don't think the UK can complain! But it's interesting to observe.

Even if user locales are set properly, I've often wondered whether automatic spelling and grammar checking, and now auto-completion, will retard the future progression of languages. In France they have l'Académie française which essentially seeks to retard the progression of French, but it's never had the power to automatically correct and "suggest" the content of people's emails.

> Given what we've forced on the world historically, I don't think the UK can complain!

Actually, Britain was different from many other colonial powers in that it kept many local languages, customs and laws in the colonies. France, to give one example, has been much worse than Britain at prescribing French and effectively wiping out many regional languages.

Important to note also that English isn't the official language of the United States. It's only the de facto standard. Nigeria made English the official language after independence, but the country still has over 300 languages. English wasn't forced, it just became an invaluable tool allowing the country to operate more efficiently.

> France, to give one example, has been much worse than Britain at prescribing French

True.

> and effectively wiping out many regional languages.

Have you any example of this affirmation? While I can cite a bunch a regional language destroyed by the French Republic inside current French borders, I have no idea of what you are referring to concerning former colonies. Native Americans in New France never learnt French and the demise of their languages are due to the English settlers, people in Africa learned French (and still do it) yet retained their own languages, same concerning North-Africa where Berber languages have been in concurrenced by Arabic not French, in Indochina French is not spoken anymore. You affirm something really strong without a bunch of example to back it, that seems to be more French-bashing than anything that really happened. The only exception I can find is in French Polynesia.

Also, your description of the Académie Française is really biased too.

I was referring to wiping out regional languages within France. But let's not forget that the French did it in Britain. Yeah, it was a long time ago. No I'm not bashing France. I like France for the most part.

For router do you mean roo-ter for the network gear and row-ter for the woodworking tool? That is useful. Not sure how to best spell out the differences, ironically my phone tried pretty hard to change things around for me.

Yes. One is for sending things on routes (journeys). Another is for routing (digging things out). I'm not sure if they etymologies converge, but they are distinctly different words spelled the same.

I don't know about the etymologies, but your argument isn't compelling. A router (woodworking) is used when the tool is following a specified route (path).

I don't know what to tell you. The facts are settled according to authorities on language which I trust. Your folk-etymology seems to be an intuitive but incorrect back-formation.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/routs

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/using-root-rou...

> recently MacOS and Google have been aggressively rewriting text as you type

OS-wide autocorrect is dangerous. I remember Scott Alexander pointing out that this happens to medical staff when typing in drug names. Someone out there probably ended up with the wrong prescription because MacOS tried to be "helpful".

https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/944739157988974592...

And, not content with US vs. Brit spellings, my Android phone's autocorrect stubbornly and insistently refuses to spell "fuck", even when I tap the word out a letter at a time. Instead it insists I meant "duck". Imposing American Puritan moralistic filters on my use of the language,... whatever next?

Have you tried adding the word to the keyboard dictionary?

One would think that a very common word would already been added to the dictionary, and not require the users to enter it to their own dictionary. I'm pretty sure "fuck" is in every major dictionary as well, so why the fuck not in the phone dictionary?

Because phones are still sold to adults that "think of the children" and decided the easiest way to stop swearing is to pretend it doesn't exist.

This is really funny but also practically helpful. My muscle memory for words like colour and centre is so strong that I have to pause whenever I write them to make sure I'm using the right spelling in the right context.

On a related note, I was on a website owned by a German company the other day that used ReCAPTCHA which asked me to identify all the images that include a "crosswalk". The right answer was clear from context but the assumption that I would know the answer was a little worrying.

As a British person I'm glad I occasionally rub up against the colonial attitude of Americans on the internet. It reminds me to think a little more about the cultural assumptions I'm making embedded in what I create.

I had that recaptcha also, I am in Denmark, I missed the first one not because it was unclear but because I have bad vision and didn't have glasses with me and one of the crosswalks was partially obscured so I wasn't sure if there actually was a crosswalk there. I thought there was but couldn't really see it so I said no. Then I had to answer 3-4 other captchas to get through after messing the first one up - the last one was another crosswalk question.

This reminded me, when in the beginning of my career in the mid 2000s I spent hours trying to figure out why some css did not seem to get applied in IE6 (Well trying to figure out why x didn't work in IE6 was what people were doing 30%+ of their time in web application development back then)

In this case it turned out to be that I was using "grey" for a color which worked perfectly fine in Firefox, but Internet Explorer only knew about the US spelling "gray" so it just ignored my declarations.

I haven't used css color names since.

Is this the perpetual meme that will never die?

https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/

Ironically the APPLE ][ used to have this some keywords where changed between UK and US version - or at least that's what my aging memory tells me

Ouh disappointing, I was expecting a transpiled CSS alternative that reads as English, eg.

    When touch screen is bigger than 600px:
        Paint class important-button:
            - red background
            - solid 1 pixel white border

At the risk of being sent to the tower - I've caved in on -ise/-ize and the former looks wrong to me now. And I'm on the fence about center/centre.

Color/Colour however. No, not now, not ever...

In the UK, the -ize spelling is generally attributed to "Americanization", but it’s actually more etymologically correct even for British English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling (It goes back as far as Shakespeare!)

I prefer Oxford spelling. Why bother having Z if you can't use it?

The 'z' is there so you can press cmd-z to undo whenever you press a 'z'.

zed is used in more places than just -ize

> padding-ton padding-top When you're thinking of your favourite bear

:-D

Shouldn't it be called PoshCSS? :).

Oh, but where is the LICENCE file?

Today I learned that American English uses the same spelling for the noun 'licence' and the verb 'license'.

If you think it's odd that we distinguish in British English, what about 'advice' and 'advise'. I think Americans still retain the two spellings?

"Licence" doesn't even look wrong to me as an American. This, along with "grey" and "gray," is one of the few where I don't bother to figure out which one is more common in which country.

I'm generally quite pleased by the comments here. None of the usual litterings of "we invented it," "we have more English speakers," etc. that I've seen on some other sites.

> I'm generally quite pleased by the comments here.

It helps it was written with humour. Although, not that humour has always stopped people on the internet from taking things super seriously.

English is not my first language, and in school we were taught British English. However, most English language culture I consumed was American. I have given up speaking anything but franken-english.

Same here. To this day I wonder why are we teaching people British English? It's not like my country is somehow beholden to the Queen, and the only English anyone here will experience outside school setting is American.

I'm not sure where your country is but at least in Europe, I think British English is more commonly taught because people are (thought to be) more likely to move to the UK/Ireland or interact with Britons/the Irish so BrE is marginally more applicable. I'm not sure that's actually true with the population differences at play.

Also, at least in a few countries what more often seems to affect the curriculum is where one's teacher is from or was trained. I don't know how widely true that is.

I can buy the "where the teacher was trained" argument. Though if so, then there's also a huge inertia, because a growing number of teachers, particularly in private English schools, is from my generation (~30-ish people), and we grew up in thoroughly Americanized world.

I don't buy the "move to UK/Ireland" justification. Someone knowing American English will handle the UK perfectly fine (the two dialects aren't that different). But only so many people travel or move to the UK; meanwhile, almost everyone in Europe is living thoroughly immersed in American culture and language - in movies, songs, books, technology, social media. From practical and economical POV, American English is a better choice.

There was one of these many years ago as well https://github.com/HashanP/postcss-spiffing

I think spiffing has a few more pieces in it.

I love the !important → !please. I've been corrected many times by Brits for using yankeeisms but is 'opacity' really one of them?

Now I want one that takes Webster's improvements to English further, and substitutes things like "through" with "thru".

Not that "through" is in a css property that I know, but I just want English to be phonetic.

juː kɑːnt gɛt ə ˈtruːli fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈɪŋglɪʃ baɪ ˈʧeɪnʤɪŋ ə fjuː ˈspɛlɪŋz. ði ˈælfəbɪt ˈɪznt ʌp tuː ɪt.

I always have to wonder about (former?) colonial countries that still want to dictate what "proper" forms of their language are. It's a British English plugin.

This could be applied as an anti-forensic countermeasure to something like "speech pattern analysis".

I could've sworn that there was an effort to insert British equivalents in CSS. what happened to it?

Much like https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/

>padding-ton

Count me in.

haha, i like this

Yes please!

The mistake here is equating English with the set of symbols borrowed from the English language for the purpose of creating a new language.

I like British spelling but this is surely a pernicious additional layer of transformation.

It's just a joke.

Should be obvious, especially with `padding-ton`

I always caution people to be careful with the 'should' and treat it like a loaded weapon.

And if that's not enough, there's also z-index.

I just don’t really care whether we’re using z-index or z-index.

I've never even considered before that some people might pronounce it "zee index" - do they really, or is that also part of the joke?

I think the parent comment was, too...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com