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Wrench spinner
Joined: Thu Oct 5th, 2017
Location: Leigh On Sea
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Chris being in the UK may be the one person on this forum to date that can say he knows PROPER English and its quite different from good ole' boy USA.
Actually it is pretty well impossible to define "proper" English.
Coming from the south east of the UK I guess I speak what used to be called BBC English, but these days, every dialect under the sun can be heard over the airwaves, some of which I can hardly understand!
In some ways American English has retained some of the old English words which have fallen out of use in the UK - "gotten" is an example, from middle English - we mostly abandoned it by the 18th century in favour of "got" but it has survived in the US - we still use it in phrases like "ill gotten gains".
Language is constantly changing but, at the end of the day, as long as people understand what is meant, it doesn't really matter.
What is rattling my bars at the moment is the insidious infiltration of American adverts on to UK tv - nearly all the car adverts show left hand drive cars carrying US plates, US pronunciation is creeping in to adverts too - with long vowels being used where we usually use a short vowel.
In fact, way too much TV is dumbed down these days - there are precious few good programmes....
Legal jargon is a whole different ballgame - deliberately written so that only lawyers can understand it and so convoluted to try to be precise that it fails both to achieve that as well as being impossible to comprehend - it makes loads of cash for the lawyers though!
Don't want to pay property tax? Do as some guy has done in NY city - convert a dumpster into a house - it ain't big but it is free as it isn't recognised as a house! Don't want to pay road taxes? buy a horse! Don't want to pay taxes? don't earn cash - everyone has a choice but if you make choices that bind you into society then expect to have to contribute to that society.
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