OH, AND BY THE WAY
Wouldn’t It Be Wonderful if Americans Spoke Proper English?
It’s nobody’s fault our words get lost in translation
Tricky, the English language can be.
You need to read what you read again.
Your brain is so magnificently tuned that I’m guessing you found the first sentence awkward, like Yoda, yet in the second sentence you automatically pronounced the present tense of ‘read’ as reed and the past tense as red?
We have even trickier problems with English. Why are words with different meanings spelt the same?
- I object to the object.
- You can’t park in the park.
- Miss Moneypenny is at her desk, you can’t miss her.
Excuse me, but there is no excuse for this.
Oh, and by the way —
I wrote a story about a friend who severed his toe using a Flymo. My American editor hadn’t heard of a Flymo, so I changed it to a hover lawn mower.
In Britain, we use Flymo in the same way we use Hoover for a vacuum cleaner. This is called genericisation — when a brand becomes so famous, it becomes a household name. It’s why we use Aspirin for any painkiller based on…
