#linguistic differences

[fiollaigean]

British authors, I love you. I really do. Your contributions to fandom are vital to our survival as a whole and global participation in fandom is wonderful.

But please.

If the character is American. On an American show. Speaking with American parlance.

They will not call their mother mum.

I understand that you guys do and that's fine, linguistic differences are normal and fine and cool.

Until I'm reading a fic where an American character refers to their mother as mum and I have to stop reading for a second, take a deep breath, and completely recenter my mind from the loop you just threw it for.

There are probably American authors who use the wrong words for British things, and that isn't cool either. But I can't speak for them. I'm speaking from my own experience.

Americans don't call our mothers mum. Most people now will use mom unless they're young children, in which case mama or mommy might be used. Of course, there are regional differences and cases of personal preference which will be different, but mom is the most common now.

Thank you for your consideration

[dystopianam]

One thing I envy a little about many languages is that many of them have a specific term to indicate a certain thing, situation, emotion, etch, while in the Italian language often it doesn't exist.

I often find myself having difficulty explaining an English term to Italian people because there is no Italian counterpart, so I use the English word directly and confuse those who speak to me even more.

But the slightly "bad" thing is that while writing in English you can simplify everything by using that single word that means exactly what you want to say, in Italian to say that you have to become Dante Alighieri and write a PDF directly

[pollspollsandmorepolls]

What do you call this? (picture below)

shopping cart

trolley

cart

buggy

carriage

pushcart

handcart

caddie

shopping trolley

other (explain in the tags)

Voting ended onJul 2, 2023

[aeolianblues]

While there are remarkable similarities between a broadly UK-based English accent and the English of many former colonies and commonwealth countries excluding Canada (hmm I wonder why), I think exactly none of them took on board the UK pronunciation of privacy. We’re with North America on this one. “Mobile” however? North America, and I think particularly the US because I do hear variation in Canada, and presumably it’s the same in Mexico too; the US pronunciation can shove it

[spirit-of-water]

Today I learned that apparently "frown" means something different in the UK than it does in the US. My fellow Americans, not everyone thinks frowning is something you do with your mouth

[stan-actias-luna]

the fact that some British people refer to sausages as "bangers" is unreasonably funny to me

like...yeah, i know it comes from the sausages making a popping noise when they're cooking or whatever

but like

bangers

what do you call that thing that looks like a sausage, which you can coincidentally also use to "bang"?

that's right

PENIS

[bookgeekgrrl]

[merysmiles-blog]

So I saw a post from Tumblr on Pinterest, and instead of doing anything I should be doing right now like writing or packing or cooking finding the original post, I'm just making a new one SO -

The original was all like "americans pronounce 'Z' zee and canadians are all 'zed' and americans are like "lol whut that's dumb" and most of the rest of the world is like "I meeeaaaan . . ."

But honestly, bruh, if we started pronouncing 'Z' as 'zed' the next thing we know, we'll be calling 'D' 'ded'