Having never won anything in my life previously, in the last few weeks I have won the following

2 return tickets to London on South West Trains

£20 Game Voucher

Tron 20th Anniversary DVD + 2 Tickets to Tron Legacy in 3D when the film is released.

So as "these things come in 3's", that should be it for the next 44 years.

Lol, aye.

That's why I was wondering what the series was like, whether to pick it up or not seeing as I now have 1/6th of it.

It quite clearly would have been underlined in red as a mistake when I was at school. My 1980 English dictionary confirms this fact.

It irks me greatly that some people would expect me to re-learn stuff like this. Why? When did the Damned Yankees win the spelling war and where's my copy of the memo?

Actually the words jail and gaol were both in use long before we even landed in the Americas. Look back to the time following 1066 when the the French being spoken in England wasn't the same as that in France. The pronunciation of 'gaol' (or gaole) morphed into 'jail' so that it would sound more like the French spoken back in France. But then when relations soured again, so did the need to differentiate language and so the two words went their seperate ways.

If you want to blame someone, blame the French, not the Americans, but then if you do that you then have to blame them for many words in the English language.

If you like blame the Romans, jail (AFAIK) actually has roots in Latin.

There isn't a war, just two different languages evolving seperately and mutually influencing each other. Your attitude really does nothing more than get you unnecessarily frustrated, and it reveals your underlying prejudice against North Americans :p The 80s were so 30 years ago too :p

I thought accepted English spelling was pretty much established in 1755. Prior to this, spelling was highly inconsistent.



The correct English spelling of gaol remained so until about a week last Tuesday. Jail is indeed listed in this work, as the French spelling.

Are you really suggesting that the British spelling changed so recently because of pressure from the French? They at least value their own language!

Eh? No. AFAIK the word 'gaol' finds it's routes in the language of the Normans.

By the time the French came over and those in England wanted to sound more like the fancy pants across the water 'jail' was imported. 'Gaol' continued in parallel usage though as it was the term always used in legal documentation.

IIRC 'To put someone in jail' actually appears in English use in the 1600s...

Dan you're like a walking encyclopedia! lol

eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Just installed my BRAND NEW Winbdows 7 Dell PC at work. It's the first time I've ever had a brand new bit of kit as I usually get hand me downs.

Shame it's a PC though

Almost feels like I work here now LOL! (after 4 years!)

This was 'win', then it suddenly veered off into 'fail'.....

Jon

Dell tend to make nice laptops but their desktops tend to be a bit crappy, however you can rip all the software off and put better stuff on their

That's why I said shame it's a PC lol

My first post from Windows 7. We're all like kids with new toys here. I've done the essentials and installed Windows Live messenger and Firefox. Oh yeah and set up work email and installed Remedy.......

How about because English spelling is currently chaotic, incredibly difficult to learn, horribly inefficient and quite frankly, bl**dy stupid?

It harms and holds back the educations of all but the brightest children and slows the portability of the language. There are few rules and those we have don't actually always apply. The fact is that if one reads or hears an unfamiliar word, it can be nearly impossible to know how to pronounce or spell it.


The Americans have got a good thing going though. We really should spell things the way we pronounce them, which we don't at the moment.

And remember, languages that refuse to change are often choosing to die. English is already a totally abused, bastardised and mongrelised language. Indeed it is only as easy as at present because of the laziness and awkwardness of previous generations. We only have two main cases, neither of which is fully productive, because previous generations stopped using the old conjugations and forms that were even harder to learn. It's the ultimate in open-sourcing

IMO the sooner we correct the historical aberrations and mistakes in the maelstrom that is the English language the better. Words like "though", "through", "thorough" and "trough" are mutually confusing and are hangovers from our Anglo-Norman past. We could make things a whole lot more efficient if we spelled them phonetically i.e. "thoh", "thrue", "thuruh" and "troff".

Consider that the example word "ghoti" could quite legitimately be pronounced "fish" - an utterly farcical scenario.

Tbh, I think the septics have got exactly the right idea. Systematic language ftw!

With all due respect, cobblers. You don't have to be 'bright' to read/write/speak properly, you just have to give a toss about doing so.

Jon