UK versus United Kingdom

> In short, beware, the way you shorten a name tells a lot upon where,
> when, to whom you write it down… Upon the typographic conventions, itall
> depends on the country where you are… But the dots are the dots
> and to be serious we should use them (oh my…)

So now lets talk about the names of places in the Balkans and the island
some of us call Crete. :)

NOT! None of us have the years required to layout the history. :)

Google Kreme wrote:

>On 27-Mar-2007, at 11:05, Jason Snell wrote:
>>Back in the day I Americanized all of the stories in InterText,
>>even those written by Brits, because I felt it was better to be
>>consistent.
>
>Ahhhhhhhh! I hate you!

Likewise. :-)

>I have no trouble understanding British English, and if I do run
>across the occasional word I'm not sure about, I do what I do with
>any unfamiliar word, I LOOK IT UP.

Its a tricky line to walk. I didn't change dialogue, or word usage,
but I decided that as the sole editor and copy editor of InterText, I
only have one complete spelling dictionary in my head and it's
American. So... I decided that "realize" would be spelled one way,
and "color," and "gray." One magazine, one set of spellings.

It's easier to assume blanket rules, but I assure you that editing
fiction requires a huge amount of discretion and each change ends up
being a pretty thorny problem. It's why I stopped after ten years of
doing it.


> As soon as I can though, I read the REAL version that hasn't been
>bowdlerized for the American readers.
>
>OK, OK, bowdlerized is a bit strong.

Too strong if you ask me. I prefer that books not be Americanized,
and enjoy editions of books I've bought in the UK. But I don't think
that ultimately eliminating some colours and turning pants into
panties and trousers into pants really is a huge crime, especially
since the bulk of your readers will see that a british girl is
wearing her pants and not understand the shock of it all!

-jason

--
Jason Snell / VP and Editorial Director, Macworld / jsnellmacworld.com
415-243-3565 / AIM/iChat: MW jsnell

On 31-Mar-2007, at 11:29, Jason Snell wrote:
> Its a tricky line to walk. I didn't change dialogue, or word usage,
> but I decided that as the sole editor and copy editor of InterText, I
> only have one complete spelling dictionary in my head and it's
> American. So... I decided that "realize" would be spelled one way,
> and "color," and "gray." One magazine, one set of spellings.

Ah, no, spelling changes don't bother me, it's changing "I'll knock
you up in the morning" to "I'll come by in the morning" or 'lift' to
'elevator' or "Well, you're a sarcy wanker today" to "Well, you're
ornery today" that bugs me.

Spelling JUST for the sake of spelling is fine, change colour to
color and it doesn't change the meaning, feeling, pronunciation, or
sense of the word. Change sarcy to sarcastic and you've lost something.

At 10:29 03/31/07 -0700, Jason Snell wrote:
>I don't think that ultimately eliminating some colours and turning pants
>into panties and trousers into pants really is a huge crime

Which of course is just the entire issue of translation in miniature. Does
one avoid translations because it's not possible to reconstruct the social
and linguistic environment in a different language? Or does one read
translations in the hope of experiencing something close to the original?
And create translations for people who desire that experience?

Yes, I understand almost all (perhaps all) of text written in British
English, whereas I might be able to pick out one or two words of text
written in Russian. And yet there's a similarity: judicious changes such as
Jason describes may provide me with an experience more like what a native
Brit experiences in reading the original text. Like the native, my
attention won't be drawn to unusual (to me) spellings and meanings, as it
would reading the original.

Edward
--
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

At 10:29 on 31-03-2007, Jason Snell wrote:
> Google Kreme wrote:
>>I have no trouble understanding British English, and if I do run
>>across the occasional word I'm not sure about, I do what I do with
>>any unfamiliar word, I LOOK IT UP.
>
> Its a tricky line to walk. I didn't change dialogue, or word usage,
> but I decided that as the sole editor and copy editor of InterText, I
> only have one complete spelling dictionary in my head and it's
> American.

I tend to agree with Jason. The Guardian Weekly publishes stories
from The Guardian, The Observer, The Washington Post, and Le Monde.
Obviously the stories from Le Monde are printed in English, but the
spelling in stories from the Washington Post is also 'translated'
into British English, including spelling within dialogue (often from
American people). I'm not aware of any substitution of actual words
(e.g. pants -> trousers), I believe this is just about normalising
the spelling that is used.

<http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk>

I think using consistent spelling gives the publication a much more
coherent and professional look than if they just left the American
spellings in the Washington Post stories. Similarly, when a US
newspaper publishes a quote from someone who is British, I would
expect them to use American spellings. I'm not talking about changing
word usage -- yes, people can look up unfamiliar words -- but the
spelling of words should be consistent. Having 'center' in one story
and 'centre' in the next doesn't seem right to me.

_________________
=> Jolin

>The big question is, what's the TidBITS style? Despite its
>international readership I'd argue that as a U.S.-based publication
>edited by Americans, settling on an American style is probably the
>wisest course of action. Back in the day I Americanized all of the
>stories in InterText, even those written by Brits, because I felt it
>was better to be consistent.

Ironically, our style has always been to honor (not honour, since I'm
American) the spelling choice of the author, as long as it was
correct and unlikely to cause confusion.

It doesn't come up very often, but I see it much the same way I see
using words like "eschew" - it reminds everyone that English is a
rich language with a lot of variability, and within reasonable
bounds, we celebrate that fact.

cheers... -Adam

Very interesting.

OK, all I can add is that several years before he died I had the pleasure of going to a lecture given by and meeting with the wonderful actor Jon Pertwee (known in the US as one of the many incarnations of Doctor Who, and for even more characterizations in the UK)

Anyway, he was asked why there wasn't more British Television seen in the US. His response was great. Any since it's been many years, I'll have to paraphrase... He said " that there would be more British Television in the US, but the executives in charge of what goes for television in the US have decided that Americans are too stupid to understand English " and that as long as these executives continued thinking that way, we in the US would be stuck with what we get.

After that he illustrated his point to the group by continue talking to us in as many of the dialects of the UK as he could remember. For the most part I had two that I couldn't get, Manx and Glasgonese, and I do much better at Glasgonese after he explained it to me. It was six of the most entertaining hours I've ever had.

As far as spelling is concerned, it all depends on your word processors spell check.

Now if you really want a fight, try the proper use of the apostrophe as used in a person’s family name. You don’t see it in the US much anymore, because most of us just accept that it’s not possible to insert it into the name, but WHY?

I’ve learned it had to do with lazy computer programmers who were trying to squeeze out every last bit of excess code. So to make sorting things simple, NO APOSTROPHEs. So now I get mail to Mr. Nan, Mr. Onan (an old spelling, it’s anglicized French after all) and then O NAN (as if my middle initial was O, it’s not), it’s always fun for the police to come looking for him because somebody doesn’t use the apostrophe properly. Then we start using the web, and you try to enter the name O’Nan or any other name with an apostrophe in it, don’t be surprised when you get directed to an error page saying something about a Microsoft error! Please note, it only goes away when you go back and spell the name without the apostrophe and don’t try making the second letter a capital either, the programs will likely belittle it. It seems like a little thing anyway, but it made a big deal in 1982 when I was looking at buying a computer for the first time, the IBM box I looked at wouldn’t let me spell my name and the Apple ][plus that I looked at did. Guess which one I bought?

‘nuff said

On Mon, Apr 2, 2007 at 2:51 pm -0700, Edward Reid wrote:

>At 10:29 03/31/07 -0700, Jason Snell wrote:
>>I don't think that ultimately eliminating some colours and turning pants
>>into panties and trousers into pants really is a huge crime
>
>Which of course is just the entire issue of translation in miniature. Does
>one avoid translations because it's not possible to reconstruct the social
>and linguistic environment in a different language? Or does one read
>translations in the hope of experiencing something close to the original?
>And create translations for people who desire that experience?
>
>Yes, I understand almost all (perhaps all) of text written in British
>English, whereas I might be able to pick out one or two words of text
>written in Russian. And yet there's a similarity: judicious changes such as
>Jason describes may provide me with an experience more like what a native
>Brit experiences in reading the original text. Like the native, my
>attention won't be drawn to unusual (to me) spellings and meanings, as it
>would reading the original.

I've just finished reading 'Strangers' by Taichi Yamada. It's a Japanese
ghost story, and the Faber edition published here in the UK is an
American (US? USian?) translation, which apparently hasn't been edited
at all for the British market. I found the effect quite disconcerting;
with any translation, there's already a barrier between author and
reader, and here I found I was continually reminding myself 'this is
Japanese, it's set in Tokyo' whenever an American idiom came up (which
was frequently).

For an American, I suspect the translation would provide an experience
closer to that of reading the original text; for a Brit, the effect was
quite alienating. (I caught myself a couple of times pondering the
Americanisation of Japanese culture, then remembering that was an
unintended side-effect. Then again, perhaps the Americanisation of
British culture is the issue...)

I'd recommend the translation, by the way - if you're American :)

TimH

The Guardian style guide, which is available online, has this to say:

Britain/UK

These terms are synonymous: Britain is the official short form of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Used as adjectives, therefore, British and UK mean the same. Great Britain, however, refers only to England, Wales and Scotland.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184840,00.html>

Correspondents may wish to study this document as an authority on current acceptable orthography in British English:

<http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2004/07/15/styleguidepdfjuly2004.pdf>

It's really quite entertaining in places - even (especially?) for US-speakers!

Alan

Having lived about half the time in both England and America, it seemed as though the prevailing tendency was to use periods in "U.S." but none in "UK". A little research has revealed the following:

The Guardian (UK) newspaper's style guide <http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184820,00.html> seems to prefer no periods in either "US" or "UK".

The New York Times leans towards periods in both abbreviations (but often just uses "Britain" or the fully spelled-out "United Kingdom" rather than "U.K."). E.g.: <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/magazine/25voices.t.html?pagewanted=3&ei=5070&en=660c91cb96ba4f61&ex=1175745600>

This article from today's BBC News website <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6521255.stm> reveals a preference for "US" and "UK", both without periods.

More generally, the BBC offers this spelling guide <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1006507>

... as well as a country profile of the United Kingdom: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/country_profiles/1038758.stm>

... and this one of the United States: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/country_profiles/1217752.stm>

- none of which uses periods in the country abbreviations.

The Royal Mail raised stamp prices yesterday and their new leaflet refers consistently to "UK" without periods (which, incidentally, they would call "full stops").

The University of Colorado at Boulder's Style Guide offers: "The two-letter abbreviation for the United States of America uses periods. The three-letter abbreviation (and, customarily, other abbreviations of more than two letters) does not use periods."

"Great Britain" isn't very popular with UK media these days, but based on limited personal experience, it does still seem to have some currency in other nations within Europe.

On 4/4/07, Thomas O'Nan <privacydoccomcast.net> wrote:

I will grant you the lazy programmer comment but I don't think it was removing excess code that's the issue or even a sorting thing. What it comes down to is databases. Many databases use the single quote or apostrophe as a way to mark the beginning and end of a string in SQL statements:

           INSERT INTO names (first,last) VALUES('John','Smith')

This becomes a problem when the name contains a single quote:

           INSERT INTO names (first,last) VALUES('Sean','O'Reilly')

This will generate a syntax error, and indeed is the reason you often see the "Microsoft error". The fix is really trivial and minor, two single quotes together:

          INSERT INTO names (first,last) VALUES('Sean','O''Reilly')

This something almost every programmer working with databases has run into. While I'm not shocked that it happens in legacy systems I'm truly disheartened that it crops up so much on web sites.

--
Michael

This apostrophe aversion on the part of Americans is too funny.  Maybe from living outside the US for so long, I've never even heard of a movement to excise apostrophes from Irish names like O'Neil.  Some families have eliminated them, true, but I didn't realize there was a pedantic resistance to this use of the apostrophe.

By the way, I don't think the great and wonderful John Pertwee should have been taken literally (or BELIEVED -- one or the other) about the American TV executives' reason for not showing more British television.  In the first place, though I'm always eager to believe the worst about American television executives, I doubt if "stupid" was their word.  It sounds too frank and self-critical.  In the second place, Petwee's examples of the many British dialects (sometimes verging on a foreign language, just as they did in Chaucer's time) don't enforce the idea of stupidity at all, do they? 

A British Council friend (an Oxford grad) once told me about a taxi ride that he took with some African types in Paris: he didn't realize until he was about to get out that the "Africans" were actually Americans speaking an American black dialect of English that he couldn't understand.  It never occurred to this Brit that his incomprehension might be due to his own stupidity!  And why should it?  It wasn't.  Similarly, is anyone really supposed to understand Manx?  That's like asking a native of Beijing to understand Hokkien.  The one thing British people, good and evil, smart and dumb, seem to have in common is a tendency to exaggerate American failings -- in this case the failure (shared by myself) to see that Dr Who was as funny or as subtle as, say, M.A.S.H.  This isn't a serious mean-spiritedness.  It's a sort of older-sibling intolerance.  But of course I could be wrong about all of this.

On Apr 4, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Thomas O'Nan wrote:
> Anyway, he was asked why there wasn't more British Television seen
> in the US. His response was great. Any since it's been many years,
> I'll have to paraphrase... He said " that there would be more
> British Television in the US, but the executives in charge of what
> goes for television in the US have decided that Americans are too
> stupid to understand English " and that as long as these executives
> continued thinking that way, we in the US would be stuck with what
> we get.

Then, there was changing the UK title of first Harry Potter book,
"Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone" to the American title:
"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". Apparently, the American
publisher didn't think us undereducated Americans could understand
what the philosopher stone was. I'm surprised they didn't move the
entire Harry Potter series to a High School in Southern California
for the American edition.

--
David Weintraub
davidweintraubworld.net
davidweintraub.name

On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, bignoseduglyguy wrote:
> The Guardian newspaper, arguably the UK's best broadsheet newspaper
> and the only one to run an 'errors and corrections' column, also
> publishes a style guide (soft and hard copy) [...]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, a.s.f.boyd wrote:
> Correspondents may wish to study this document as an authority on
> current acceptable orthography in British English:

On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Brad Mallet wrote:
> The Guardian (UK) newspaper's style guide
> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184820,00.html> seems to
> prefer no periods in either "US" or "UK".

On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Miche Doherty wrote:
> The Guardian style guide, which is available online, has this to say:

Not that I disagree that the Guardian style guide is (apparently) a
well-written & authoritative guidline for such things, but I do find it
amusing that everyone keeps citing a publication that gets referred to
as The Grauniad because of its reputation for typographic mistakes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#The_Guardian_in_popular_culture

http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/005479.html

Etc :-)

--
Chris Devers

Chris

--On April 6, 2007 3:26:01 PM -0700 bignoseduglyguy
<bignoseduglyguygmail.com> wrote:

> I think you'll find the reputation is less warranted these days.
> Furthermore, The Guardian is still (or was when I left the UK) the only
> UK newspaper to publish a regular Errors and Omissions column to provide
> those wrong in print the right of reply.

They also carry Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column, which even, on occasion,
takes the Guardian to task for publishing poor science.

a great weekly read.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/>

[I think this thread has pretty much run its course. Let's wrap it up. -Joe]

At 07:39 04/05/07 -0700, David Weintraub wrote:
>Then, there was changing the UK title of first Harry Potter book,
>"Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone" to the American title:
>"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone".

Then there's "Girl with a One Track Mind", published in the US [sic] as
"Diary of a Sex Fiend". And just to make the link, the author (real name
Zoe Margolis) worked as an assistant director on one of the Harry Potter
movies.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2007/03/12/070312ta_talk_toobin

Edward
--
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

David Weintraub wrote:
> On Apr 4, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Thomas O'Nan wrote:
>> Anyway, he was asked why there wasn't more British Television seen
>> in the US. His response was great. Any since it's been many years,
>> I'll have to paraphrase... He said " that there would be more
>> British Television in the US, but the executives in charge of what
>> goes for television in the US have decided that Americans are too
>> stupid to understand English " and that as long as these executives
>> continued thinking that way, we in the US would be stuck with what
>> we get.
>
> Then, there was changing the UK title of first Harry Potter book,
> "Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone" to the American title:
> "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". Apparently, the American
> publisher didn't think us undereducated Americans could understand
> what the philosopher stone was. I'm surprised they didn't move the
> entire Harry Potter series to a High School in Southern California
> for the American edition.

Most folks would NOT understand. Now we can diverge into a discussion of
how the US educational system is on a long down hill slide or just move on.


[Let's just move on. :-) -Adam]

Michael Krzyzek wrote:
> On 4/4/07, Thomas O'Nan <privacydoccomcast.net
> <mailto:privacydoccomcast.net>> wrote:
>
> Now if you really want a fight, try the proper use of the apostrophe
> as used in a person's family name. You don't see it in the US much
> anymore, because most of us just accept that it's not possible to
> insert it into the name, but WHY?
>
> I've learned it had to do with lazy computer programmers who were
> trying to squeeze out every last bit of excess code. So to make
> sorting things simple, NO APOSTROPHEs.
>
> I will grant you the lazy programmer comment but I don't think it was
> removing excess code that's the issue or even a sorting thing. What
> it comes down to is databases. Many databases use the single quote or
> apostrophe as a way to mark the beginning and end of a string in SQL
> statements:
>
> INSERT INTO names (first,last) VALUES('John','Smith')
>
> This becomes a problem when the name contains a single quote:
>
> INSERT INTO names (first,last) VALUES('Sean','O'Reilly')
>

Call me lazy but when you're stuffing a customer record into 256 bytes
you pull out all the stops. Oh, yeah, 8KB of ram to run in. First step
is 6 bit ASCII. Nothing lazy about it. With 10 mb disk drives costing
$10,000 you squeezed every bit. And then some. Then end result was some
names never could be spelled "correctly".

I was always a bit bemused by folks who called Y2K a conspiracy. In our
data base we inherited a date scheme where the first byte was months
since Jan, 1970 with the second byte being the day of the month. We ran
into our own private Y2K in the mid 80s which required a LOT of work to
dig out of. (We stole the unused day of month bits and used them to
extend the months since number with a logical test to figure out which
format something was in. That put us in a position where we KNEW that
the computers would be dead and gone when the bits ran out.)


[OK, looking like time to wind this thread down. -Adam]