Math or Maths?

[WA Toffee]

Maths includes pi. No need to mention separately.

"One thing that does jar the North American ear, mind you, is when we hear a commentator say, "He just about got a hand to that," to describe a fingertip save by a goalkeeper. Over here, "just about" means the exact opposite."

Eh? "Just about" means they did it ... just ... surely! What kind of mad logic can interpret that another way?

The phrase that grips my $hit is "near miss" ... if an aircraft nearly misses another then surely it has hit it. Is that a phrase from the US?

But near and nearly are two very different words. Near means close, nearly means almost. That is why they call it a "near miss" and not "nearly missed"

 

[njligernj]

English is susceptible to variation simply because so many people speak it. It isn't the same now as it was 20 years ago, however, despite the tide of change there always has to be an attempts at a line, and it has to be drawn somewhere. It is about being respectful to a culture. If I don't speak another language well, (and I regret that languages were not something that comes well to me), then I don't damn well speak it shoddily and expect people to speak to my level and accept it. I want to be corrected. It's beyond ego,it's disrespectful to try to change another's culture.

I obviously agree Americans shouldn't try to correct you.

On the flip side it's not like Americans forgot how to spell ... they deliberately made changes and I think most of the changes they made to the English language were improvements (so long pointless U's) many of which were subsequently copied and adopted by English English as well (we had a thread about this a while back ... I wrote too much about it ... shocker).

Isn't basketball netball with a backboard target

Yes.

Isn't baseball simply rounders with a bigger bat to allow a margin for error and a huge glove to help you catch .... oh and helmets? ;-)

Yeah pretty much.

*I mean ... isn't american football rugby, allowing participants the protection of padding, frequent oxygen breaks and permission of the strategically simpler forward pass?

No ... it's one of the most strategically interesting games on earth.

 

[Jeff Jones]

An interesting topic, this, and you could argue your point and never be entirely wrong. It probably comes down to what's commonly used in your community. What's right where you live doesn't work where someone else lives.

I've only recently come to realise that Americans, and I assume Canadians, have got something right that we Brits and Australians - I can't speak for others - have been getting wrong forever. When we go out to buy something we go to a shop.
When Americans do so they go to a store. And they're right.

Shop is a verb. The store is where we go to do it.

Even so, the Brits - well, the people who inhabited the place then - were speaking English when indigenous North Americans and Australians weren't speaking English at all.

That's a bit of a clumsy way of putting it, but I suppose what I'm saying, generally, is that we Brits were doing it before you.

 

[TheBlueGibbon]

An interesting topic, this, and you could argue your point and never be entirely wrong. It probably comes down to what's commonly used in your community. What's right where you live doesn't work where someone else lives.

I've only recently come to realise that Americans, and I assume Canadians, have got something right that we Brits and Australians - I can't speak for others - have been getting wrong forever. When we go out to buy something we go to a shop.
When Americans do so they go to a store. And they're right.

Shop is a verb. The store is where we go to do it.

Even so, the Brits - well, the people who inhabited the place then - were speaking English when indigenous North Americans and Australians weren't speaking English at all.

That's a bit of a clumsy way of putting it, but I suppose what I'm saying, generally, is that we Brits were doing it before you.

Shop is attested as a noun in Old English as sceoppa, store is basically the Old French version that was introduced by the Normans. The verb 'to shop' would appear to come from the noun not the other way round.

 

[formerly manx toffee]

Agree - can't tell you how pleased I was the other night to prove for my daughter the following:

cosh (x+y) = (cosh x cosh y) + (sinh x sinh y)

Something I had not done for 32 years, yet was stuck in the back of the memory...

You're taking us off on a tangent there mate.

 

[formerly manx toffee]

We don't shorten analytics to anal. though.

 

[lmurkder]

Maths

 

[The Esk]

You're taking us off on a tangent there mate.

Just proving the site appreciates hyperbolic functions......