PDA

View Full Version : This should help things along....

chuckie egg
04-24-2003, 07:48 AM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2970815.stm

Now wheres my crisps?
dickieC
04-24-2003, 08:51 AM
In yer pants.
rmr
04-24-2003, 03:46 PM
Loved those Chuckie!!
dinzdale
04-24-2003, 04:02 PM
I'm sure we could list a few more:

UK - Drunken Lawyer = US - Bealeblues
masterofNone
04-24-2003, 07:26 PM
Okay, since this keg has been tapped, I have a question that has been driving me crazy. A few years ago it became apparent that "the" was extinct in the United Kingdom. I mean, for example... " I went to visit him in hospital" whereas we would say "I went to visit him in THE hospital." I first noticed it with THE Concorde. I noticed that all brits referred to it simply as "Concorde". "I flew to New York on Concorde." So the question is... Why? Are we once again displaying our basic ignorance of the language or is this just an example of the divergent evolution of the language?
dickieC
04-25-2003, 05:34 AM
It is just Concorde. It was called that to express the concord between Britain and France, when we built the damn thing. It's too iconic to need an article. Although I suppose the French probably call it "le Concorde".

It's the same as when Americans drop "and". For example, when you say "two thousand one" for the year, whereas Brits (and Australians, New Zealanders - and Canadians?) would say "two thousand and one".

And it always bugs me when you say "I wrote him". We need a preposition there!
masterofNone
04-25-2003, 07:50 AM
'kay. So there's no invisible grammatical rule that we're ignoring then. thanks