If PHP were British
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Yes, it was fun at first being asked to say all sorts of words which sound so funny to you guys. Convincing the more provincial of Americans that yes, we do in fact get to meet the Queen for a cup of tea on occasion and yes, she is a very nice lady.
But when I see posts like this I can't help but be reminded of a tired old joke that no-one thinks is funny anymore but they keep on telling it anyway because they don't know how to stop.
Or perhaps I'm just being a grumpy old sod. We're famous for that too.
- Told people my name is Rupert, Tarquin, or Archibald (no-one will question it for fear of sounding rude- doubly so because they think we're very particular about manners)
- "Where are you from?" "Iowa." "Oh..."
- "Harry? Oh yeah, good lad. Bit racist but what are you going to do"
And so on, so forth. I certainly don't begrudge an interest in all things British, because it's preferable to the situation Americans often find themselves in when abroad, where they're considered cheeseburger eating morons.
Just think- they could all be asking you when your last football riot was.
Surely, that should be "good old chap", if P.G. Wodehouse taught us anything ;-)
I hope you used Nigel too!
Hey now, some of us resemble that remark.
Multiple middle names are good, especially if one of them is St. John. Now that I think about it, that's going to be my go-to first name. "How do you spell that?"
I suppose some people must like it, because here it is getting voted to the #2 spot. Dear upvoters, that's your prerogative, and even if I could stop you, I'd have no right to. But I must insist on publicly voicing my disapproval.
I'm not really how you could regard this article as pompus self-regarding wankery, but I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree.
1. there is opportunity for genuine discussion here (why can't I write my programs in my native tongue? is it an insurmountable problem to let me type 'colour' and for you to see 'color'?) but that opportunity is never taken up
2. It's wrong. If you're going to make a joke at least get it right - this isn't British English, this is "I looked up some random stuff online" English
3. It's not funny. It can be if done well but this post, like many others, takes a "throw everything I found at the wall and see what sticks" approach. Some of them are great - the switch/case statement is a genuine improvement, in my eyes. Some of them are just pompous wankery, as you so elegantly put it.
> I can clearly see that this article is meant to be a mockery of old, stereotypically British way of speaking
I am insisting that it should be a mockery of old, stereotypically British way of speaking - as it stands, it isn't, it's a mockery of what the author and several other people (yourself included) consider to be a stereotypically British way of speaking. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're gonna take the piss out of me, please do me the honour of doing it well.
Funny is personal. I found it very funny. And in what way is it wrong? Because British people don't actually speak like that? That's part of the joke. Someone could make an American version with alert("howdy pardner") and I don't think anyone would take it seriously.
I think what the world really needs right now is a dapper programming language.
insert jokes about forking England's repo and the chaos that ensues
The author is a Brit. I know, for I am he. You're welcome to dislike it, of course. My humour isn't the same as everyone else's. But "pompous" is a bit much. Except for the bits where I was aiming for pompous.
Maybe I'd be more interested in the British people if they used the correct words and proper pronunciation. ;-)
One thing I have learned about forums etc on the net is that humour written down can be so very badly misunderstood. Particularly dry, witty, sarcastic humour. I used to fall in to all sorts of trouble when I thought I was being oh so funny. I now try to be very careful when I want to be funny.
Dunno if this will mean much to you, but have you ever seen the UK comedy Blackadder? If you have, imagine it written down. It just reads as plain rude. But with Rowan Atkinson performing the lines, it becomes funny. If you haven't seen it, and like oldish Brit comedy, see it. Im sure there must be US shows that work like that too. I suppose reading a script of "Louie" might well seem very unfunny? Perhaps?
I shall now posh mumble and apologise a lot, and go!!!
More over, its not like we Brits don't hold dear all the American stereotypes. IMHO, it would be nice with we Brits and Yanks could banter back and forth like we do with the Aussies. I mean, how boring would live be with out the Aussies ribbing us?
IMHO, there is something a bit too serious about the British relationship with the US, that doesn't exist with, say, the Aussies. Or, is it that the US is very serious with every one? While the US has some great comedians, there does seem to be a huge lack of a national sense of humour. Very serious country the US.
http://search.cpan.org/~simonw/Acme-Lingua-Strine-Perl-0.54/...
or perhaps you prefer to program in Nigerian Spammer?
http://search.cpan.org/~jwalt/Acme-Lingua-NIGERIAN-1.0.0/NIG...
I mention this because this is no mere regex "rename the keywords" exercise either, but a decent attempt at really making Perl work in grammatical Latin.
would_you_mind {
// Code here
} actually_i_do_mind (Exception £e) {
// Politely move on
cheerio('Message');
}
would_you_mind {
// Code here
} sorry_im_afraid_that_might_present_something_of_a_challenge_right_now (Exception £e) {
// Politely move on
cheerio('Message');
}A common complaint I actually heard was about how you could tell that the computer was american because of how blunt and "rude" the error messages were and why weren't computer sold in Britain better mannered?
would_you_mind {
// Code here
} i_cant_be_asked (Exception £e) {
// Politely move on
cheerio('Message');
} would_you_mind {
// Code here
} im_afraid_so (Exception £e) {
// Politely move on
cheerio('Message');
}No more scratching heads when things like the following don't work:
#id {
text-align: centre;
text-transform: capitalise;:)
"Parse error: syntax error" -> "You taking the piss, mate?"
Yes, connexion.
The spelling connexion is now rare in everyday British usage.I manually went through half a dozen dictionary files - all of them were terrible, full of things like "connexion", and even words that haven't been used since Chaucer's time. The online dictionaries aren't much use either, all the American ones are wrong, and the OED is far too out of date to be of any use (Britain is absorbing a lot of American words and spellings at the moment)
Edit: And let this be a lesson to anyone else trying to localize a website from en-US to en-GB: Every reference you have to hand is wrong. If you don't get an actual British English speaker to look over it, we will laugh at you.
Edit2: Dug up some of my notes from an en-GB <-> en-US dictionary file we attempted to use:
We don't use "gaol" or "gramme" anymore
"Ton" and "tonne" are different measurements, not translations of each other
"Practise" and "practice" are not interchangeable
"Check" cannot be globally replaced with "cheque"
"Terrorise" is not and has never been a word
Really? That's how I've always spelt it.
I know this article is tongue in cheek, but I like to roll that out when one of my fellow brits goes on a rant about american english.
Me personally, I go with the american spellings all the way.
(I still use the "s" spellings, though)
I'm really curious now, please tell us the answer.
The idea is that the words originally came from ancient Greek, where they had the ending -ιζειν, pronounced with a z. The trouble with that is that not all these words did come from the Greek. E.g. realize/realise was (IIRC) a French invention, and they spelled it réaliser. And even in the ones that did come from the Greek, not all of them had the -ιζειν ending - e.g. analyse/analyze was ἀνα·λύω (pronounced analuo); I guess the French gave it the -yser ending.
(The real solution, IMO, is to reject the idea that the 'correct' spelling of a word is the one closer to how it was spelled in the language it was invented in).
cheerio('Message');The problem is, some of the code had been cut and pasted and saved as text and Danish and Norwegian are very close so sometimes that would work, and sometimes it would seem to work but errors would lurk around every corner, and only occasionally would it fall flat on its face in obvious ways (if it'd been transferred from a different language version at least it'd been more likely to be obvious on reading through the code what needed to be modified..)
And insist on using English, because most programming languages are in English. It is defacto standard for programming and computers in general, and I am not discussing it - it's just how it is. Therefore selling a commercial product and providing documentation only in Japanese is a massive oversight on Sony's part.