This seems dumb but harmless unless they're also saying "maths". Then it's a sign of the apocalypse.
Also, do people in the U.S. study physic?
The pronunciation of "Gloucester" (gloster) and "Leicester" (lester) follow a similar scheme for the "-cester" bit which leads to "Worcester" being pronounced "wooster", but Worcestershire sauce is often pronounced "wooster sauce" which doesn't make much sense.
Apparently, Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce in England, though it certainly doesn't compare to some Welsh towns. (I say it as "froom")
Worcestershire and Worcester follow the same patter as Gloucestershire/Gloucester, Leicestershire/Leicester and (Towcestershire doesn't exist)/Towcester. Towcester, incidentally, being the same pronunciation as "toaster".
The one that annoys me is Cirencester, which is usually "sai-ren-ses-ta", and only occasionally "sai-ren-ster".
It sits on the River Nene, which is pronounced Neen or Nen depending on which bit of Northamptonshire you live in (Northamptonshire is not very big...)
Or, according to my grandmother, "siss-iss-ter".
"That's just incorrect. It's pronounced "wooster-shuh". The double-O is short, as in "book". Worcestershire Sauce is sometimes simply called "woosters", as in "a dash of woosters".
> Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce
Hardly. It's pronounced "froom". That's not so hard.
And there's a Gloucester[0] (pronounced 'Gloster' or, more likely in MA 'Glostah') there as well. And there's one[1] in Virgnia too, (Wikipedia says it's pronounced 'Gloster', but I don't know the VA accent well enough to know if that's locally correct).
There are other similar place names around the US, mostly on the eastern seaboard, for obvious reasons, as well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester,_Massachusetts
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester_County,_Virginia
Bad example, since some accents pronounce "book" like "kook" (not like "suck") ;)
Also, this scene from Archer cracks me up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4jxLxZrMfs
I agree that it's not tricky to pronounce, but the difficulty is pronouncing it correctly.
Worcestershire sauce can be called "wooster-shuh sauce" or "wooster sauce" or as you say, "woosters".
Map men explain it best.
That is at least the theory I've heard
(Many words place names long pre-date any kind of attempt to regularize English spelling, and in any case come from fusions of Brythonic, Norman, Roman, Norwegian etc languages. This is why it's difficult to predict the pronunciation of one word from the spelling of another.)
Someone asked about physic ... well people used to use physick in [late medieval?] British English... but that's for what we might call medicine now.
When you say "maths", how many do you mean? If you mean all collectively that would be singular, e.g. Mathematics is the study of ...
All of them.
I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
No, that's arithmetic (which is always singular, amusingly).
I find it generally amusing to examine the differences between U.S. and British English and quite often get confused over whether I should be using "licence" or "license". It's the little quirks of language/spelling that make it interesting. (Though english, I'm a big fan of some of the U.S. contractions such as "y'all'd've")
I would say "math" is an objectively better shortening of "mathematics" as it preserves the singular collective meaning than "maths" which preserves more of the incidental textual form.
We Americans use the phrase "do the math," which means to go figure something out, not necessarily arithmetically.
Is there a similar phrase for the Brits? As in "do the maths?" Which seems unlikely. As such, I'd expect those using British style English to have different phrase for the same thing. Is that the case? If so, what might it be?
Probably a "just so" definition to satisfy my American ears. I bet they'd say that any one of those is still "maths" by itself.
Brits are also comfortable that ‘economics’ abbreviates to ‘econ’.
Let’s not pretend either of us has a rational basis for this argument.
That's the correct way of doing it if you've naturally got a British accent (or really any accent where you clearly learned British English as a second language).
Americans saying 'maths' is like dragging fingernails down a chalkboard.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9MRYJz9-4 [video][1 min]
I love the irregularity of English.
Same with maths - if you only have one type of mathematics then math would make sense. But there are many types of mathematics, so we call it maths.
A friend jammed all the drawls into a single catchphrase which he used for laughs for weeks. "The daaataaa on the staaatus baaar is made of an aluuuuminum cahhhhmpaaaund and stahred on a cd-raaaaaaahm"