Bravo BB, that one does my head in too.
Everyone seems to get scampi right, why not panini?
-
This site is sponsored by Lang & Potter.
Random irritations/questions
- Thread starter PL2 3DQ
- Start date
Everyone seems to get scampi right, why not panini?
Players referring to their manager as âgafferâ. Irritates me, along with âearly doorsâ and âcorridor of uncertaintyâ. No logic to my irritation, itâs just there.
We go again, leave everything out there, give 110%, blah blah blah.
Can't really blame the players I suppose. They all get media-trained to within an inch of their lives. If they say something daft they'll never be allowed to forget it so they might as well stick to the tried and trusted formula.
Because nobody ever orders a singular scampo I suppose. But yes you're spot on.
Yet another Americanism that's being taken up here and, yet again, sadly now infecting the Guardian. The other day I read about "an homage", the writer clearly imagining the 'American' pronunciation of the French hommage with a silent h and -age pronounced as in fromage, etc.
Words and expressions like laissez-faire, no probs - they do a job and there's no exact English equivalent. I'm perfectly happy that English is such a magpie language - I see the co-opting of foreign words as adding to its richness and depth, rather like importing exotic culinary ingredients - but what is wrong with the English word homage, with the h pronounced and the word ending in -age as in eg. baggage? George Orwell wasn't thinking of an 'ommaaaaaaaajhe to Catalonia, was he?
That kind of Frenchification is just aspirational pretension - from the French-hating land of freedom fries, of all places. I'm just waiting for a Brit to talk about cooking with 'erbs next...
Words and expressions like laissez-faire, no probs - they do a job and there's no exact English equivalent. I'm perfectly happy that English is such a magpie language - I see the co-opting of foreign words as adding to its richness and depth, rather like importing exotic culinary ingredients - but what is wrong with the English word homage, with the h pronounced and the word ending in -age as in eg. baggage? George Orwell wasn't thinking of an 'ommaaaaaaaajhe to Catalonia, was he?
That kind of Frenchification is just aspirational pretension - from the French-hating land of freedom fries, of all places. I'm just waiting for a Brit to talk about cooking with 'erbs next...
Last edited:
Ha ha! I think the difference is that pizza is singular (and pretty much an 'English' word these days, as per my post above) so pizzas seems fine. Panini is already plural, and I don't think anyone would have minded half as much if they'd been introduced into this country as (one) panino, with the still incorrect but less annoying paninos following as the plural.
Pluralising a plural grates far more, I think, as in one criteria (wrong in the first place) and two or more criterias (non-existent, and a word I particularly hate!), when it should be criterion and criteria.
That's an interesting one! No way of knowing how Orwell pronounced it I suppose, although there's a good chance he pronounced it the French way - he did live in Paris of course.
I'm quite certain he pronounced it the English way when speaking in English, as I'm sure all Americans did back then too. It only seems to have been in more recent decades that they've allowed their language to be degraded even further, which inevitably means we end up with the degradations here as well sooner or later, thanks to American hegemony.
Look at 'obliged', for example, which has now become 'obligated' in the US. In the westerns I used to watch as a kid it was always "Much obliged to you, ma'am." It's just further dumbification that's led to 'obligated', back-formed from 'obligation'.
I have spent far too much of my life being annoyed and passive-aggressively muttering under my breath about inconsistent use of date formats in database stored procedures and application layer SQL.
Isn't it obvious that you should always:
Sort dates using YYYYMMDD format; CONVERT(varchar, [date], 112). Or, I suppose you can use 23 if you must, but it's a waste of 4 bytes for the "-"s.
Display dates using DD-MON-YYYY format; CONVERT(varchar, [date], 106).
Perfect chronological sorting, and no ambiguity when displayed. Why would anyone do anything else?!
I suspect very few others will share this frustration.
The US trying to tell the rest of the world about the whats, whys and hows concerning the threat of a nuclear bomb being used in warfare.
Oh no, you stay in your corner and leave that discussion to those who haven't committed such an atrocity.
Oh no, you stay in your corner and leave that discussion to those who haven't committed such an atrocity.