Your favourite accent

I am still working on my next Sydney post.

Ray arrived in Australia in 1970, just at an age when he would not be called up for war service in Australia. He made the acquaintance of one Jock McGregor, whose Scottish accent was so broad and thick, he was unintelligible to me, and almost everyone else.

Ray also met Agnes Peaston when he arrived Melbourne, and Agnes went on to be our friend. She lived in Punt Road, Richmond and when we helped her move to her first Australian property she owned in Anzac Street, Murrumbeena, we realised she was a terrible hoarder, with trees of books stacked next to her toilet. Agnes, older than us, had certainly lived an interesting life, which I might expand on in the future, but Agnes was very well educated and spoke with what I describe as a posh Scottish accent. Her diction and voice were perfect, in spite of being a heavy smoker. Yet she still had strong Scottish accent. Is there such a thing as a posh Scottish accent? A genuine question.

That would be my favourite accent in the world. What is yours? 

Kinda back

I am not making my splendiferous return to the world of blog. I just want to write a little rant, after hearing weirdness on one of our commercial tv news bulletin. I call it the car crash news, and there was ripper tonight whereby many cars were damaged and the driver of an unmarked police car accidently gave the miscreant a bump with the police car, with him receiving multiple bone fractures, and he is under police guard in hospital. 

The incident was also covered by the 7pm ABC TV News, somewhat less sensationally than the Channel 7 news. 

Then came the pre ad promotion for a following story by Channel 7 newsreader, Peter Mitchell. 

How to reduce your risk of dying by 40%! 

The 40% odds for perpetual life is quite good. The detail was made clear in the story. I calmed down, until this...

Reduce your mortality by 25%.

In spite of my poor lifestyle choices, isn't that something for me to grasp at too?

PS For those who follow Elephant Child's blog, I am sure we are all wishing her well as she recovers from serious surgery. I think she is the most caring person I've come across on the internet, and that is quite a statement. Be well, EC.   

AI is coming to get you

Have you noticed comments on your blog written by AI? Or have you recognised AI writing? 

Melody Jacob is one such person but I can't get my head around her purpose. While her blog has advertising, it does seem like a personal blog. I am sure the comments she sprinkles around on blogs are AI written, and perhaps her posts are too.

Those of you who are quite literate can probably pick AI writing...at the moment. It will get better, until we won't know the difference between what the human brain writes and what AI writes, and it won't take very long for this to happen. 

Evan Edinger is a very accomplished YouTuber. I am not so keen on his rapid fire delivery but it is clear he puts a lot of work into his clips. He's from New Joisy (😉@Boud) Jersey but has lived in England for many years. 

I would not normally watch a fifteen minute clip about something like AI, but this was well worth my while, and it may be for you too to get a better understanding of AI writing. 

You say 'tomayto'.

l found this interesting and surprising as I headed down a rabbit hole. Although Australia is more inclined to British English, it is changing.

Great Niece: Auntie Andrew, I've pressed the button for the elevator.

Me: It's called a lift here in Australia, dear child.

Great Niece: The elevator is here. 

I felt like a bag of wheat being transported in the elevator. 

What has surprised me is how many American pronunciations I use, and I guess most Australians do too. It is fairly quick from the list below to list the American pronunciations I use. 

Adult

Basil. I don't use either pronunciation. I say it like the name, or can the name be said differently too. 

Buddha

Esplanade

Evolution

Falcon, but I can remember using the English pronunciation too

Garage, but see above

Often, neither. I say orfen. 

Pasta

Privacy

Stance, I go either way, actually right in the middle.

Yoghurt

My car understands the navigation order "Home', but it can't understand me giving an address to travel to. I gave up on that.

On the home front, of course I am constantly dealing with accents. Phyllis and Kosov began by respectfully speaking only their fluent but slightly quirky English in my presence, but over time, they slipped more to using their own language, which is mostly fine with me. I've only chipped them once when we were at bakery seated at an outdoor table and they weren't speaking English. Guys, it's the three of us sitting here for brunch together, English please. It is weird how they switch from their language and English, talking together in English at times, and even to their parents on the phone. 

50 Common Words AI (and People) Mishear Across the English-Speaking World

April 30, 2025AI, LanguageLeave a comment

This post explores British and American pronunciation differences through the lens of AI speech recognition, offering new insight into how we speak and how machines listen.

As someone who teaches English phonetics in Singapore, I’m constantly navigating the subtle differences in pronunciation across accents. But nothing has opened my eyes to those differences quite like trying to get AI to understand them. Training language models has become a new lens, a strange and fascinating window, into how speech works, and where it breaks down. And although we take a deep dive into the research in this post, it’s important to appreciate how difficult this challenge really is—I know firsthand as a teacher.

You: “Set a timer for my next shed-jool.”
Siri: “Searching the web for… ‘shuttle?’”

From shed-jools to vitamins, even the smartest AIs struggle to keep up with how English is spoken around the world. The reason? Speech models aren’t trained on all English equally.

Speech AI now powers your Zoom meetings, call centers, captions, classrooms, and health apps. But these tools are overwhelmingly trained on standard American English and it shows. A Stanford-led study found that African-American speech had nearly double the word error rate (35%) compared to white American speech (19%). A separate global benchmark showed that accents from India, Britain, and France had up to 49% more errors compared to American-accented input.

Even OpenAI’s Whisper, one of the best available today, still performs better on U.S. English than on British or Australian. Meanwhile, platforms like Siri and Alexa have long struggled with Irish and Scottish accents, prompting users to change how they speak just to be understood.

This isn’t about funny mishearings, it’s about fairness, inclusion, education, and opportunity. When your accent isn’t recognized, your message often isn’t either.

And the systems aren’t being rude. They’re just undertrained.

Until models are exposed to a wider range of global speech, millions of users will keep getting subtly sidelined by systems that just don’t “hear” them.

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Why AI Still Trips Over Accents

Even today’s most advanced speech systems struggle to understand all accents equally well. Despite impressive improvements, multiple studies show consistent accent bias, particularly against non-American and non-standard dialects.

The Data: Bias in the Benchmarks

As mentioned above, a Stanford-led evaluation (Koenecke et al., 2020) of five major ASR systems—Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon, found that transcripts for African American Vernacular English had a 35% word error rate (WER), nearly double the 19% for white American speakers.

In a larger audit spanning 2,700 speakers across five continents, DiChristofano et al. (2023) found WER gaps ranging from 2–12% for non-American accents, translating to up to 49% relative error. Indian, French, and Southeast Asian-accented English were among the hardest hit.

Even among native speakers, bias persists. OpenAI’s Whisper performs far better on American English than on British or Australian varieties (Graham & Roll, 2024). UK studies show that “prestige” accents like Received Pronunciation are recognized more accurately than regional dialects (Markl, 2022).

Why It Happens

Most speech models are trained predominantly on American data. As a result, the burden of intelligibility often falls on the speaker not the system.

Speech recognition models work by breaking down audio into phonemes and matching them against statistical patterns. But those patterns reflect the training data. And when that data skews heavily toward a single accent, everyone else is left misheard.

Sound Patterns That Commonly Confuse AI

Certain phonetic shifts are especially tricky for ASR systems:

• /æ/ becomes /ɑː/ in words like advertisement, patent, and pasta. Vowel shifts are unevenly represented across training corpora.

• /aɪ/ vs. /ɪ/ in words like either, neither, and vitamin. Models often guess based on spelling alone, lacking contextual accent knowledge.

• Non-rhotic /r/ drops in British English words like parliament, wrath, and version, leading to alignment errors.

• /ʃ/ vs. /sk/ in schedule (shed-yool vs. sked-jool). This cluster confusion breaks decoder predictions.

• /ɪə/ vs. /ɛ/ in leisure and niche. American decoders often miss the glide.

• T-flapping vs. T-holding in tomato and route. American English flaps the /t/; British English pronounces it clearly—confusing the ASR.

These sound mismatches often trip up models in real-world use. For instance, schedule, vitamin, and mobile are common stumbling blocks for AI depending on whether it hears British or American pronunciation.

Anecdotal Proof from the Real World

This isn’t just theory. Users have long reported needing to “code-switch” or Americanize their speech just to be understood:

• Siri and Alexa had well-documented trouble with Scottish and Irish accents.

• Google Assistant often mishears British time phrases due to differences in /t/ pronunciation.

• Contact center pilots have shown customer satisfaction increases when using accent-neutralizing AI layers.

• Reddit users frequently report toggling between British and American spellings or pronunciations to get accurate results.

Until these solutions become standard, speech recognition remains biased. For teachers, students, and users with regional or global accents, the experience can still feel exclusionary. The irony is sharp: the AI that talks back still doesn’t always listen properly.

 

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The Ultimate British vs. American Pronunciation Table

What confuses humans also confuses machines. Below is a table of over 50 words with distinct British and American pronunciations, many of which AI often misunderstands, especially when the user’s accent doesn’t match its assumptions.

Word	🇺🇸 American	🇬🇧 British
Advertisement	AD-ver-tize-ment	ad-VER-tiss-ment
Adult	AD-ult	uh-DULT
Aluminium	a-LOO-min-um	al-yuh-MIN-ee-um
Amen	AY-men	Ah-men
Asia	AY-zhuh	AY-shuh
Bald	bold	bawld
Basil	BAY-suhl	BAH-suhl
Buddha	BOOD-uh	BUD-uh
Clique	clik	cleek
Crescent	CRES-uhnt	CREZ-uhnt
Data	DAY-tuh	DAH-tuh
Dynasty	DIE-nuh-stee	DIN-uh-stee
Either	ee-thur	eye-thur
Envelope	EN-vuh-lope	ON-vuh-lope
Esplanade	ES-pluh-nard	ES-pluh-nayd
Evolution	EH-vuh-loo-shun	EE-vuh-loo-shun
Expatriate	ex-SPAY-tree-ut	ex-SPAT-ri-ut
Falcon	FAL-kun	FOL-kun
Garage	guh-RAHZH	GA-ridge
Herb	ERB	HERB
Laboratory	LAB-ruh-tor-ee	luh-BOR-uh-tree
Leisure	LEE-zher	LEZH-uh
Medicine	MED-i-sin	MED-sin
Meter	MEE-ter	MEE-tuh
Mobile	MOH-buhl	MOH-bile
Missile	MISS-uhl	MISS-eye-ul
Neither	nee-thur	nigh-thur
Niche	nitch	neesh
Oregano	uh-REG-uh-no	or-uh-GAH-no
Often	OFF-en / OFF-tuhn	same
Parliament	PAR-luh-ment	PAR-li-ment
Pasta	PAR-stuh	PAS-tuh
Patent	PAT-uhnt	PAY-tuhnt
Patronise	PAY-truh-nize	PAT-ruh-nize
Privacy	PRAI-vuh-see	PRIV-uh-see
Produce (noun)	PROH-duce	PROD-juice
Progress (noun)	PROG-ress	PROH-gress
Project (noun)	PROJ-ect	PROH-ject
Route	ROWT	ROOT
Schedule	SKED-jool	SHED-jool
Scone	skohn	skon
Semi	SEM-eye	SEM-ee
Stance	stans	starns
Tomato	tuh-MAY-to	tuh-MAH-to
Vase	vays	varz
Vendor	VEN-door	VEN-duh
Version	VER-zhun	VER-shun
Vitamin	VAI-tuh-min	VIT-uh-min
Wrath	rath	roth
Yogurt	YOH-gurt	YOG-urt
Zebra	ZEE-bruh	ZEB-ruh

 

You say tomato, I say tomato

I follow a couple of YouTubers who often reference differences between the US and the UK.

Spellings and different words between the two are fascinating. I am surprised to learn how many American words we use, because we generally use our historical English words, spellings and pronunciations, but not always.

So what do you call this? A roll of....  If you are American, possibly Scotch Tape. Scotch Tape was available here. I remember the non sticky start bit was a tartan pattern. If you are from the UK, possibly Sellotape. I initially grew up calling it Durex, as I learnt from my parents. But then Durex, here at least, became a synonym for a condom, so that fell out of favour. I now call it sticky tape.

 

What about the tape you use if you want to tape up a cardboard box to make it sturdy? For me it is packing tape. How about you? 

Then there is this, painting edging tape. Not as sticky as packing tape as you don't want to rip paint off as you remove the tape, but it can at a pinch be used as packing tape.

 

What are your thoughts and memories? 

Thoughts about words

I am not sure where I was going with this old post draft. 

About twenty years ago while driving Mother somewhere on one of our motorways, a driver did something bad in front of me and in the presence of Mother, who had slapped me as child for saying bloody, I dropped the c word. You c***. It is not a word I normally use. I can't remember using it since. I immediately apologised to Mother, who continued on telling me about her medical woes without seemingly to notice. Nearly twenty years later, Mother was correct and her medical woes proved to be fatal, with a lot of medical woes along the way.

While I've never mixed among the lower classes in England, apparently they use the c word without abandon. The word becomes boring with overuse and loses its effectiveness. But like gay men embraced homophobic terms, so too are women embracing the c word. I recall a beggar calling me a fucking old poof. He stated the obvious. His insult was a fail.

I am never sure if is appropriate to describe a black American as being black. I think the preferred term is African American. That's fine with me. Whatever. But I laugh when I hear stories of Americans who visit England describe black English people as African Americans, even though the black English have no connection to America. In Britain, you are British, and your colour and racial heritage is not so publicly important. You are British first. The plight of disadvantaged African Americans in the US is the equivalent in Britain of the plight of the disadvantaged British. 

It is a queer thing that so called African Americans, many who have been in the US for far longer than their British counterparts have been in Britain, yet they need to be distinguished as Afro Americans, and not just Americans. 

Whatever, black American, black British and black Australian, they all face discrimination. It is just not so in your face in Britain and Australia, and there are programmes to promote an inclusive workplace. That has just disappeared in the US. This Afro American term is very queer. The first black slaves arrived to America in the early 1600s, yet they need to be name qualified beyond just an American by the colour of their skin. I am not naïve enough to suggest your best mate is a black person, yet here, I do see socialisation between the Indian immigrants and white Australians, through work, neighbours and of course food. 

The leader of Australia's His Majesty's Opposition Party is one Peter Dutton, an extreme conservative, and he would like to do many of the things that #47 has been doing in the US. I gave some thought to a insulting adaption to his name and the best I could do is Duttrump. Yes, the wrongly named conservative Liberal Party leader is Peter Duttrump. 

It's all about the words

The longer I am a blogger with US blog mates, the more I learn but what I never expected was such difference in our common language of English. I knew the basics like tyre/tire, bonnet/hood, boot/trunk. Why are these so car focused? I can't remember the US equivalent of glove box. 

From blogging, I learnt mould/mold and various other different spellings. I even learnt about Sterno stoves yesterday, and what Sterno actually is. Most interesting and I don't know why we never had the ultra safe Sterno here. 

However, our grammar almost always matches, yet I've been jarred by one difference. Take a bow Steve. 

I am a poor old age pensioner, so the government gives me $450 a week to support myself. This is not enough. I need to inform our Prime Minister that this is not enough. I need to write the Prime Minister, and I will have wrote the Prime Minister. Do I have that right for how it would be written in the US?

No matter, whatever is written like that just smacks me in the head like no spelling difference ever has. I will write to the Prime Minister, I will have written to the Prime Minister and I wrote to the Prime Minister.

Given how US, UK and Oceanic English grammar matches, this is one mighty big difference. Steve is an American and was a professional writer, so I am quite sure he uses correct grammar for his US readers, but isn't it remarkable that this is the only grammar difference I've noticed. Aside from my own grammatical errors. Maybe you know more?

I think the New Jersey Boud is UK or Irish born? I hope I am correct about that. But she has difficulty understanding the speech in Downton Abbey. Their accents aren't mine, but I can understand them perfectly well. The world is a strange place in so far as the English language goes.

Last night I took Phyllis and Kosov out for dinner. They shared a pizza and ate some of my chips, and souvlaki bread. The bulk of the bill was my two glasses of wine and an affogato with Scotch whisky. If you don't know, affogato is strong Australian style coffee poured over ice cream and with whisky poured over the top of that. 

Kosov's English is quite good, but you may remember me mentioning the way he pronounced margarine, as marg, as in Margaret, arine. Given he has to drop his résumé into to many places to find work, I insisted on him learning how to pronounce resume. This night I've learnt the difference between resume and a CV, Australia, US and Canada are in agreement. But is does strike me as odd that we have a choice between French and Latin for a job application, and not English. 

My hearing aid batteries will be changed today, as I do every Sunday, but this Saturday night, one is already warning me, baddery and not battery.

I'm not done yet. With one day of 40/104 degrees, media warned us of a heat wave. One day of extreme heat is not a heat wave. Media shot itself in the foot, as what superlative can it come up with for a real heat wave, such as today, tomorrow and the next day, 38/100,  39/102 and 36/97?  

Malaphore

Do you know the word? I didn't. 

To my shame, I've practiced malaphores in public. I wasn't arrested.

No one has ever remarked on my I think my sole malaphore that I've used on my blog more than once, it being, "And what really gets up my goat".

It is a combination of two expressions, being "What really get up my nose is...", and "What really gets on my goat is...".

Have you ever malaphored?  Do you mangle our beautiful language in a deliberate manner? I do like a bit of word play. 

After today's heat and stress over will writing, I am going to bed now with a bit of a migrant. I'll feel better tomorrow.  

The accent

Not my strange accent but the Australian wog accent. Yes, wog and I use the word in a respectful manner as this post would be lacking without the word. You could call it an Australian Mediterranean accent. Think Greece and Italy. It is delightful and I find it rather stimulating, if you get my drift. It comes with promise of exciting times. 

The accent is dying out and not heard so often now. Nowadays the newborn of immigrants speak with an Australian accent by the time they become adults. It wasn't so with the Mediterraneans. The first Australian generation developed their own accent. If you memory is first class, I did mention about hearing a school student from a lower socio economic area on a tram saying, 'And he arsed me to give him the answer'.

This clip is just a bit amusing but the performer gives a great example of the Aussie wog accent.

Passed on

Australia has unfortunately picked up the American phrase, passed on, and that has religious connotations, as passed on to a better place, perhaps heaven, maybe hell, but is there anywhere for we who are at times good and at times bad? 

In response to someone who uses passed, I will use the word passed, but for me the words are dead or has died. In my personal life, I have not said passed. 

Passed sounds gentler, softer, less confronting. But my Ray did not pass. He died suddenly, with some pain as his guts filled with blood from his ruptured aorta. He passed nowhere. He died while unconscious from blood loss. He's gone. Completely dead. 

I know I am out of step with society on this one, and if you say passed on, that is fine with me, but in my life, people have just died and they are dead.

My old blog had a about thirty unpublished posts, and this is the only unpublished post I have, written either on July eleventh or November seventh.  I can't tell from 11/7/24 with Blogger inconsistent dating system.  

Here is a photo for you. It isn't fake. Apparently you were given time for shopping in Vienna along the way. Would you like to take the trip? The fresh fruit in Vienna is rather good, imported from somewhere, along with apple strudel with vanilla sauce (custard). 

"Darling, an omnibus to Calcutta? What fun!"

It should have been a non posting day

Do I need to explain what is obvious to me? Staffers monitor Metro movements at the Tallawong control centre. Why doesn't the control room just have staff, who control things? Staff sound cheaper to employ than staffers. 

Station Controller Riva Shaheen, Chief Controller Daniel Merlino and Station Controller Nicole Radakovic. Australia has changed. No longer are station controllers called Mr Smith, Mr Jones and Miss White. This is good as it is a representation of modern Australia. But I would guess any Australian shareholders in the in the international company that runs Sydney Metro, are called Smith, Jones and White. 

I made a comment on someone's YouTube clip. I didn't expect two kisses in the reply, Thank you Andrew xx.

Do we root or rowt? 

In Australia we used to pronounce the word route as root, and I still do. But from somewhere, you guess and I'll point, the rowt pronunciation has come to the fore. 

I've just said the words route as as a path on a map, and root as in a tree root and my mouth movements are different. Root v. route, it is different, disregarding rowt. 

Have I breached your boredom threshold yet? I expect so. 

A date anyone?

That's so ambiguous isn't it. I am talking about about time dates and the US using a different general date system to the rest of the world. 

Published on the 11/24/23 is clear but not what I am used to. If it was 09/10/23, Houston and Blogger, we have problems. 

Blogger gets it right for Australia at this final point.

So as I type this on my sister's birthday, 6th August, this below was not of concern to me today as I had no need for my motor car, but I think it would be month old history to Americans. I do really wonder why America doesn't adapt to the world with world standards rather than stand alone as the great world power. 

Mondegreen

Mondegreen comes from people hearing 'laid him on the green', as 'Lady Mondegreen'. 

While I know I am wrong, I still hear Macy Gray singing in her hit song I Try, 'I try to say goodbye my old chook' instead of 'I try to say goodbye and I choke'. I think this happens because of her pronunciation of choke. I simply can't unhear chook in the song line when I hear it. I don't know if the word chook is known around the world but it means a hen, of the common variety that give us eggs to eat. 

I saw something this day (I've just been reminded by a television commercial that's using the song) as I write this reminded me of another of my Mondegreen moments when I was very young. 

It is not,

My body lies over the ocean

My body lies over the seas,

but it is

My Bonnie lies over the ocean

My Bonnie lies over the sea.

My extensive one minute research indicates a capital B for Bonnie, so she is not a bonnie (good and nice looking) lass but her name is Bonnie. 

I'm sure I have other Mondegreens, but what are yours?

This seems to a modern image of a bonnie lass.  (I can't find who created this image)

Road rules

A motorist yelled at me today. I was crossing a street illegally against a flashing red man. However, it should have been quite safe to do so as turns from the cross street are banned, with flashing no left turn and no right turn lights. I hesitated as I was half way across as from the corner of my eye I saw a threat. A car was illegally turning right. I turned around to him and held the palm of my hand upright, to suggest what was he doing? The left hand passenger window came down and I received a mouthful of abuse. 

It's funny how people react when they are challenged over something they are doing wrong. They abuse the accuser when the person himself or herself have done the wrong thing. My illegal crossing inconvenienced no one and was quite safe. He had traffic banked up behind him as he waited to make the illegal turn. 

Does abusing an accuser mean anything to you? It can often be political tactic. 

Words #397

I pronounce words so differently to many people in Australia. I don't know why. It is just how I speak. Here are some  examples.

Integral. I put the emphasis on int, but mostly people put the emphasis on teg, inTEGral rather than my  INTeGral. 

I say KILOmetre. Most here, even in England people, say kilOMetre. I recall then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam telling us of the correct pronunciation when the metric change occurred, and that's how I've pronounced it ever since. 

I pronounce secretary as SECretry. Most say SECreTARY. 

I say REPortarge as a French word, which it is, but others say rePORTage. I was far from being young when I first heard the word, and the way I say it is how I first heard it said by radio broadcaster Elaine Canty. I don't think I've ever heard said the word aside from in media.

ProTESTors and not PROtestors. ProTESTors do PROtest.

Your suburb might be Reservoir and you pronounce it as Reservor, and I happily do the same. Your suburb, you have the right to pronounce it how you like. But if you have a body of stored water in Reservor, I will call it a reservwha in Resevor. 

None of this is intentional on my part. It is just how I speak. I would guess I had some strong influence at a young age from someone or something. I am too old now to change the way I speak.

I've not finished yet, sorry. My hearing aids speak to me with a very limited vocabulary. I think I've heard them say, Maximum volume. I am not sure. I can't make them say that now. But the other word it says, and I've heard this a number of times when one of the batteries is exhausted, is battery. Except it is pronounced baddery. They are two very different sounding words. Where would that come from? It sounds so weird. What other words are there with double t between an a and an e? Cattery. Caddery. How amusing.

The times are a changin'. During AM this morning, ABC radio's thirty minute current affairs programme, the host was talking about period bleeding, 'a new treatment for women and others who suffer from excessive bleeding during their periods'. I don't have a problem with 'others' and I just thought it was interesting to note as a society and media marker. 

I no understand

Transport for New South Wales, TfNSW, is changing its in train announcements. There was only mention of three I read about in the Sydney Morning Herald but there could be more. It could be argued that the change would help some tourists with very limited English, but I doubt there would be many. Often train and general noise is too high to hear the in train announcements anyway.

"This train terminates here", (sorry if you don't understand that) will be replaced by "This train ends here" (what brought about the train's demise?). The former is apparently technical railway jargon and not clear enough for public consumption. Really?

If there is a train disruption of some kind, you will be advised to, "Allow extra time", rather than "Allow additional time". That one is not such a bad change in my opinion.

This last one is just plain ugly. Customers Passengers will no longer be advised to "Alight here to change...", but "Get off here to change...". GET OFF!

Maybe even young people educated in Australia don't understand the words 'terminates', 'additional' and 'alight'. 

Maybe I'm just an old grump. Who  cares? By the hundreds of comments on the newspaper article, many do. 

W'dya reckon about the changes?

Hmm, two weeks today since....

D'lingo

A very busy brain melting afternoon booking our next holiday. Why can't you just sms a selfie to prove you are old enough to receive a senior discount? The holiday is months away but will be a nice break from our winter cold for a week or two. Oh for the days when booking holidays I had to look at work holiday leave, rather than fitting holidays in between medical appointments. 

I lament the loss of Australian English to US English. I've come to realise it is a battle not worth fighting. Australian children will say elevator and not lift. They must be confused that their teachers teach them z is zed but hear it in media as zee.

Much Australian slang has been lost but not because of US influence. Such slang just died out. Some words and phases came from the UK, but we also invented our own. 

I am not a young and modern person so I am somewhat out of touch with young people, but I do pick some things up.

Where we buy fuel for our car the facility could be called a petrol station, in older times a garage, to copy the US a gas station, but I haven't really heard that. Mostly nowadays we call it a service station, where you don't receive service but do it all yourself.

Australians love to shorten long phrases to shorter words and to extend shorter words to longer. Thus the name Jo will become Joey, or Joey Girl. 

Back to the car service station, in slang it has become a servo, now no longer a place to just buy petrol and half a pint of oil to pour into your engine, but a place to also buy stale sandwiches, machine made coffee and a many times heated Mrs McGregor meat pie (I do exaggerate for dramatic effect).  

Servo such a great addition to Aussie slang. Use it frequently and often. 

Grand or great?

I read in the electric newspaper the term grand niece and that had me puzzled. From the person seeming to be reading directly from papers on ABC Radio, I heard the same. 

The story was about a grand niece of a former State Premier now seeking preselection as an electoral candidate. 

Great niece and grand niece are the same, as Google tells me. It can even be great grand niece. I think I prefer to have great nieces than grand nieces. The OED informs me using great niece and great nephew is twice as common as using grand.

I did not know about grand and great being the same. Did you? And if so, why didn't you tell me?  

Kid off the street and words

I am amazed at how such places as restaurants don't bother about getting their English correct. They could pull in a poorly educated white kid off the street and pay them $20 to correct their English spelling, grammar and style for their websites and signage. Ok, maybe not poorly educated, but it is a rather basic matter for native speakers of English. It's about words.

A couple of years ago I offered to correct the English in the website of our Malaysian friend Danny. I did so by email. I am not sure if he took notice. He doesn't maintain the website himself. I just took a look and he has a new website, very slick and a skim read indicates the English is fine. https://www.dankoff.com.my/ It's about words.

It was sad to hear of the death of Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue, AC, CBE, DSG, at the age of 91. She was one of the stolen generation. I don't know the right words but in the past we would say she was a half caste, and so she was removed from her family and brought up by missionaries at a very young age. If the parents didn't hand the children over, the law would hear about it and come looking for them. 

She became the first Aboriginal nurse in South Australia and eventually rose in bureaucratic circles to become a very respected person and she did so much work for Aboriginal people. She also worked in in a caring role in India. She went on to work for NGOs, and became head of the Aboriginal Development Corporation. Photo from The Guardian. 

 A paradox is that the missionary education for the stolen generation gave us many well educated and extremely literate part Aboriginal woman, and some men too. Many went on to be great spokespeople for their race. There is a very long list but most are no longer with us. It's about words.

The things you learn from blogging, like in America mold is the spelling, whereas for us it is mould. Canada seems to have a bob each way with spelling. I wonder about the word moult. It's all about words.

My efforts to make my young relatives say lift instead of elevator is futile. They have learnt the word from American media. What's in a word?

I've agreed with myself to tolerate the common pronunciation of kilOMetre. For some reason it has been matched with the pronunciation of odometer. God Gough told me the correct pronunciation is KILOmetre and I am an oddity with my pronunciation of the word. I don't care. That is the way I have always said the word. Please don't eve say kays to my face.

What still sends me into an internal rage is orientated and disorientated. Why? What is wrong with oriented and disoriented? Interestingly I was watching an American YouTube and so pleased the speaker did not say orientated. 

Some of you may think, what does it matter as long as you can understand what is being said, and that is a valid point, but there has to be a basic standard way of speaking, even if it changes over time. 

Having a laugh

After yesterday, I needed a laugh. Australia Day was worse than I thought and has been underreported by tv media, at least. 

Apparently there are a few words Scots find very difficult to say and they are especially hard for Glaswegians. I read that somewhere and then I was down the proverbial rabbit hole. I learnt rather a lot about the origins of Scottish and it was quite interesting. But you know me, in one ear and out the other.  Now I have to learn how to insert TikTok clips. 

Google tells me these phrases are difficult for Scots, but I can't see why. "Purple Burglar Alarm", is a well-known one that often trips up anyone with a Scottish accent.

While the second and less known one is "Irish Wrist Watch". The rabbit hole tells me it is about one of the origins of Scottish. Ryan is quite entertaining.  I can see how young people get addicted to TikTok. Of course his looks, charm and humour have nothing to do with my interest. 

In case the clip doesn't work, 

https://www.tiktok.com/@rsullivan1991/video/7149585358404029701?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

I watched this TikTok by Ryan too. This one is based on the word beaver and is rather cheap humour but I think the word beaver with a certain meaning crosses The Atlantic. If you are easily offended by cheap smut, please watch the clip and then express your outrage. I am sure Matilda Murgatroyd Municman from Upper Kombuctor West will make her views known.