Survey time!

[icepixie]

Take a look at my userpics. Comment thusly: of those, which do you most associate with me?

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Polls! Because I realized that I've had a paid account for rather a long time now and I've made, like, three polls. This should be rectified immediately.

The first of today's polls is brought to you by this poem about serial commas. (A serial comma occurs here: Billy, Bob, and Jane. It does not occur here: Billy, Bob and Jane.)

[Poll #744031]
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The second of today's polls comes about because it was recently discussed on a message board I visit. Also, everyone loves food. This poll may be applicable only to Americans.

[Poll #744032]

Comments

[icepixie]

I am honestly of two minds as far as simplification of spelling. For example, one part of me says, "C and Q are useless! K, S, and KW can perform their functions completely adequately! We must be more efficient and uniform!" Then the other part says, "But they're pretty!" And that's kind of my reaction to a lot of measures to simplify spelling.

As far as American punctuation--I know there are a couple you do leave outside the quotation marks; a semicolon is one, and I think a colon is the other one. I'm honestly not sure why you do that. However, the British way seems even more inconsistent; in dialogue, they tend to put everything within the (often single, but not always) quotation marks for dialogue, and then nothing within them for other types of writing. I can discern absolutely no rhyme or reason to it.

My best guess is that "filling" was the translation from the German, and everyone else translated differently?

Wouldn't surprise me.

I wonder sometimes what a Henry Higgins type would make of me :)

*snerk* The only two things I picked up from a year in England are "flat" and "dodgy." I lived in a college-owned apartment this year with three of my friends who'd been on the program with me, and we just called it "our flat" and each other "flatmates" purely on the basis of it being a heck of a lot fewer syllables. I like other Brit vocab, but honestly it sounds very strange coming out in a mild TN twang, so I tend not to use it in speech. *g* Although I think I've picked up some British speech patterns, if not vocab; I use "quite" and "rather" a lot (which is possibly not a stereotypically British speech quirk, but for some reason in my mind it is). Some of that is being Southern, as well; apparently our speech is a wee bit closer to British English than other areas of the US.