On 12.05.14 21:28, Mark Filipak wrote: > I listen to the BBC almost all the time. I think the hosts butcher > English as thoroughly as the average American.
True, the modern BBC's English on its website is egregious, with adjectives morphing to nouns, as in "The abducted Nigeria girls ...", grating like fingernails on a blackboard. (Any pretence that it is a special newspaper language (Headline-ish) is entirely unconvincing when the website does have room for the extra 'n'.) Mind you, our Aussie ABC, once as pukka as the BBC of yore, also leaves a lot to be desired. Apropos quotes, have I lobbed here from a parallel universe, or did we in the distant past quote film titles and similar text strings, e.g. "One flew over the cuckoo's nest"? Now they're just capitalised, and so run into preceding and following capitalisations, resulting in ambiguity. The American dialect is not too hard to understand if a few translations are kept in mind. E.g. Ah-loo-me-numb = Aluminium (Am. spell. = Aluminum, I kid you not.) sodder = solder (But how is "flux" then pronounced?) offov = from (Maybe it comes from Russian?) Erik (Scurrying for cover) -- You may call me a pedascule, but I for one do not choose to palter with the language and will not blench from using the best word even if my portance is occasionally a fardel to my readers. - http://blogs.abc.net.au/newseditors/2010/09/should-words-die-so-that-language-might-live.html
