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My mission: To get Australians to pronounce Aluminum correctly

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Yep. I reckon the US can take its aloominum and make a shiny foil crown for Ms Saira Moany.

The word is ceremony. No moans.

And while we're at it, what's with all this "off of" and "outside of". Off with their ofs!!!

Meantime, in the interests of Anglophone unity, it's time for a multi (that's multy; not multeye) million dollar educational campaign on the appropriate use of "lose" and "loose".

I think I'm going to learn classical Greek. It least it's not changing by the day.

Ghoti
 
aluminium and aluminum are both correct. The difference arose from the word "alum" which is a double sulphate of aluminium and potassium...and alumium, aluminum and alumina, oxides of aluminium...and aluminate a salt whos acid is aluminium hydroxide.

Much is in the hands of the dictionary itself. If you pay $70 to $100 for your dictionary then both aluminium and aluminum will be included.
If its a cheap handy dictionary then lots of words are missing.
 
Not necessarily an Americanism, but another one that grates is "must of" or "would of", often seen on ASF.



It's "must have" or "would have" or use the 've contraction if you must - eg "would've".
 
wayneL said:
Not necessarily an Americanism, but another one that grates is "must of" or "would of", often seen on ASF.



It's "must have" or "would have" or use the 've contraction if you must - eg "would've".
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Yes that pisses me off.

..and then there is less and fewer which aussies misuse too much and basically have no clue unless they study the language or teach it.

Do we misuse much and many ? NO. So why less and fewer?
 
Depot is a word that springs to mind.
The 'e' sound is pronounced as a long 'ee' by North Americans,
but should be pronounced as a short 'e'. eg. Yesterday I went to
the bus 'deepot' and purchased a ticket.

It's all about Webster vs. Oxford. Noah Webster disliked the English. Many American scholars will admit so. Spoken English has been butchered and most Commonwealth countries including the US pronounce vowels differently. Just go to NZ to buy some 'fush' or 'mulk' hey bro! Or go to Canada no 'doobt' 'aboot' it! :
 
And "kinda" is sexy in a way (like prospectors avatar ) but just another one of those television soap opera abbreviations that stick in peoples minds.
 
In 1807-88 Sir Humphrey Davy established the existence of the metal. Davy proposed the name alumium for the metal, undiscovered at that time, and later agreed to change it to aluminum.
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I think those are just typos above. He originally proposed aluminum but it was later changed to aluminium to match other elements' names, eg cadmium, palladium.

The confusing of bought & brought grates on me - I brought a new camera and I've bought it with me. Yuk.

Also it's not 'a myriad of' anything it's just myriad. If you use it like you would use 'many' you can't go wrong.
 
While we are on pronunciations, here in Oz we have gotten used to excising a syllable from the many words ending with ary, like temporary. To me it should be pronounced tem-po-ra-ry not temp-ary. This seems to have become mainstream with pollies, teachers, radio announcers etc all guilty of it. I for one, point this out to my kids every time they take a short-cut with words.

Cheers,
 

Live for a while in a country where English is only a second language and you'll be articulating in no time!
 
This is not another spelling and grammer thread. More a speaking thread.

Having travelled overseas to many english speaking nations, I now understand why they put subtitles for Australians even though we are speaking the same language.

Have any of you noticed when some people is asked a question (Shane Warne comes to mind) they answer the question by saying:
'Yeah no', which means no
and 'No yeah', which means yes.

Then when they have completed their answer they say 'soooooo' which means my answer is over, can you please say something back to me so that we dont have an awkward silence.

Other words which come to mind are:
Wensday
Seveneen
and anything with a 'th' pronounced as 'f', eg. fursday, furteen, fought etc.

As aarbee has said, we tend to leave out entire syllables/letters from any word which has more than 6 letters. Either we are lazy, do most of our talking when we drink beer, raised with dumbed down television, or we are very good at being efficient. Maybe a combination of all four. hehe

PS. I would love to know who was the first person to end an email with the word 'cheers', they started a revolution. I wonder if 'How's tricks' will be as popular. Yes, hows tricks might sound funny now as a replacement for hello, although there was a time in the mid 90's when people thought cheers was an odd replacement for thankyou.

I guess that original email was implying that if you do your assigned task as you have been asked, you may get a drink by the end of the week. That manager became a very popular guy and the trend followed, with or without a drink at the end of the working week.

I watch way to much Seinfeld. hehe
 
The one that I hate is "from the get go"
Does that mean from the start.
Why not just say so.
 

If they want to make words shorter, then why do so many people, including our ex-PM, say knowan instead of known? I've even heard renown pronounced renowan.

Two others poorly pronounced, and sports commentators are the worst offenders, are sikth for sixth and twelth for twelfth.
 
wayneL said:
There is also a big argument over apostrophes over here
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I've seen discussion about that elsewhere, in relation to Birmingham council deciding to remove all apostrophes from street names.

Of course some streets have been like that for yonks. Could you imagine London having a Knight'sbridge (according to Wikipedia: "It is recorded that the citizens of London met Matilda of England at the Knight's Bridge in 1141"), or Sydney having a King'sway?

GP
 
My goodness, I feel so much better after reading this thread. I have a permanent campaign of self talk telling myself not to get infuriated by the continued poor grammar and spelling that abounds.

As others have noted, the particular irritations are:

'there' for 'their' or even 'they're'.

'less' when it should be 'fewer'.

and many others.

But, jeez, more than anything else it's the lack of understanding of how to use apostrophes that drives me nuts. There seems to be a culture of 'if in doubt just add an apostrophe - anywhere!'

I've even seen otherwise articulate and intelligent posters write "He say's it should happen.....".

And 'it's' when there is no call for an apostrophe.

Please, people, if you're abbreviating the words "it is" then yes add the apostrophe because it's an indication to the reader that something has been omitted, i.e. the i of is.
But ' a lizard sheds its skin' does not need an apostrophe.

Grrr!
 

Excellent stuff and even better here: http://www.apostrophe.org.uk

Yes, you've guessed it, The Apostrophe Protection Society.
 
Actually dear mere commoners, the element Alumium was invented by Humpty Davros, King of the Daleks, at 7.15am, on the 10th of April, in 1437.

And this is how he spelt tit.

Just like Uraninium, Voltron and Cybeartron.
 
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