Would it be too much to ask for Microsoft to incorporate the following dialogue box into the next version of Word?
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rENNISance woman by Cath Ennis
Matt Brown said: "You can blog about whatever you wish, as long as it is related to science and research". His wish is my command! Here are some snippets from my life as a cancer research grant wrangler in Vancouver. Mostly the silly bits.
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A Word Wish
- Date:
- Wednesday, 20 Aug ust 2008 - 00:18 UTC
“Word has detected that this document contains a mixture of British English and American English. Would you like to standardise your spelling?”
Yes – British English / Yes – American English / No
Sigh. A girl can dream. Maybe I can just
herd those catspersuade those PIs to use a consistent spelling scheme when collaborating on a grant application.And please don’t tell me I shouldn’t be using Word – I don’t really have a choice…
(Cue argument about the correct spelling of standardise).
Last updated: Wednesday, 20 Aug 2008 - 00:18 UTC
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Comments
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OK. I’ll bite. ‘Standardize’ is (British) English. ‘Standardise’ is Australian.
Go on. Look in the OED. I dare you.
Cath, I think that’s a brilliant idea. It wouldn’t be that difficult, would it?
Richard, I bet you twenty quid that the OED will cave on that point within the next ten years. With 99.5% of the British population using -ise, who is really ‘right’? Language is the domain of the people who speak it, surely.
{ducks under the desk, waits for incoming salvo}
Nature’s house style is ‘-ize’. So there.
I’ve noticed – and it’s exactly what I would have expected.
OK Jen, 20 quid it is.
Fowler says that
ise is a French invention. ’Nuff said. ;)Oops, I didn’t intend that strikeout.
…and I was taught in school (in foreign country) that -ise was [British] English and -ize was American [English].
hmm… now I’m confused. Again.
Cath> sounds like a lovely idea. Although, I wonder if you can’t do; ‘mark all’ and then do ‘language – set BE or AE’ and then “spell check”? Wouldn’t that give the same result?
bah. Foreigners.
It wouldn’t give the same result, Asa.
The ize/ise is just the tip of the iceberg. And many of the spelling differences are irregular and can’t be predicted (think curb vs. kerb, tire vs. tyre, specialty vs. speciality, skeptic vs. sceptic)(Amusingly, the NN spellchecker has just underlined all the British words in that list in my preview pane – why is NN’s spellchecker American, Matt?). There are thousands of examples of words like that, and this doesn’t even touch on the grammatical differences.
It would be so much easier if we all wrote in Chinese.
Or Hebrew.
Jenny> ahh.. I knew that there was something I’ve forgotten. (like all the words that are different apart from -ise and -ize) haha, that’s morning without coffee….
or Swedish :)
I think a non-alphabetic language like Chinese might have some advantages when it comes to avoiding spelling discrepancies. But perhaps there would be other ideogrammatic solecisms to contend with?
We have a lot to thank the French for – including giving us much of our language: all those ‘-ent’, ‘-ion’, etc, words.
When doing my degree, a biochemistry lecturer diverged briefly to point out that the American ‘sulfur’ had become the accepted global spelling, so it was okay to dispense with the British ‘sulphur’. But I prefer the latter and still use it.
I think a non-alphabetic language like Chinese might have some advantages when it comes to avoiding spelling discrepancies. But perhaps there would be other ideogrammatic solecisms to contend with?
I’m sure Grant would come up with something.
Lee, funnily, I’ve always felt that ‘sulfur’ just looked wrong. Ditto ‘gray’.
Richard, I knew you’d bite :-) You’re the only Brit I’ve ever known who has insisted on the -ize ending. I’m sure you’re right, having never looked into it too closely, but I think you’re going to lose your money to Jen!
Asa, the problem is that I receive text from lots of different people, some of whom have their language set to British and some to American English. So I’ve added both versions of lots of words to my spellcheck dictionary to avoid lots of red underlining on my screen that prevents me from seeing real typos (I’m good at spelling but not at typing). The problem comes when I have different versions in the same merged document. I use British spelling for Canadian grant applications, and American spelling for US applications. But I often reuse bits of text in a different application. Fun fun fun.
Incidentally, the only word that Firefox software is highlighting as misspelled in this comment is spellcheck.
I’d better hope the Chinese take over the world, then…
Cath> I finally (duh) understood the problem when Jenny answered me in another of these comments about the other words that are different ;) It was morning after all….
I wish you good luck though! And that it doesn’t take too many hours. Seems really frustrating.
I was reading this fantastic article on English spelling the other day during my train ride (yes, I am a scientist who tries to actually read fully through the Economist once a week). That’s yet another place that I’ve seen strange British phrases pop up in formal writing (other than in these fancy Nature Network Blogs by Richard Grant and Cath Ennis). I’ve been midway through an article on financial stability and come across words like “dodgy”, which although is now part of the Canadian lexicon, I can’t read without hearing it in my mind said by Cath’s British accent…
Both TWL and SOWPODS (the American and International versions of the official scrabble word list) allow both standardise and standardize.
All things being equal you will get more points for standardize. Obviously.
TWL will allow only colorise, but SOWPODS allows all four versions of the word. This is probably more useful to know because of the bingo possibilities…
Nowt wrong with dodgy, mate.
Bronwen, I don’t even know what colo(u)ris/ze means. Does it just mean to colour something?
I am smiling. Yes, it probably does.
Aside: If I open to a page at random in my book of official scrabble words (outdated, unfortunately) I will recognise less than half of them. I have a feeling that I would have the same experience if I opened a “big” version of one of the major normal dictionaries.
I’m sure my (print) Scrabble dictionary allows words that aren’t really words. It seems to really stretch with the permissible alternative spellings, for example.
I am laughing wryly. The first time I played at a scrabble club (filled with sneaky little old ladies), I had the following thoughts (not necessarily in this order):
- That can’t be a real word. [it was in the word list]
- That might be a word, but it isn’t an English word. [it was in the word list, there are hordes of Scots, Welsh, French words that are allowed]
- Surely it can’t be that both spellings of this word can be allowed. [both were in the word list]
- (Expletive)! There are 30 tiles left, and I cannot see a single way of playing even if I could look at the tiles in the bag before taking them.
I also learnt that it was not thought to be At All Clever to ask your opponent what the word they had just played meant. The only question was whether it was on the list.
Another thing: some little old ladies cheat. If you challenge them at the beginning and then run out of steam, they do start putting down words that are not on the list. And they know it. And they laugh about it afterwards.
Do you play too?
oh no!
I have done it again.
NEVER use dashes as bullets!!!!!
I play whenever I can! Still mourning the loss of Scrabulous on Facebook – the new versions are region-specific so I can no longer play games with my sister in the UK and brother-in-law in Vietnam. Luckily we have now found a Boggle-like game to play instead.
Since the demise of scrabulous, I have gone back to the International Scrabble Club site, and am playing under the name “BronwenAnn”.
A disadvantage of this program, though, is that the games are played “in one sitting”. A big advantage, though, is that it is fast… and of course there is no advertising. They also have duplicate scrabble, though I haven’t really worked out how to participate…
Have you come across dicewords? It is actually quite pleasing and a welcome addition to the “games to take on long trips”.