{"id":822,"date":"2013-06-09T14:04:28","date_gmt":"2013-06-09T02:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=822"},"modified":"2013-06-09T14:04:28","modified_gmt":"2013-06-09T02:04:28","slug":"you-say-tomato-and-i-say-tomato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=822","title":{"rendered":"You say tomato and I say tomato"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tomatoes\"<\/a>My dining companion was fulminating against the use of American English.<\/p>\n

The particular document that was causing him so much distress contained no American spelling.\u00a0 There was no sign of color<\/i> in place of colour.\u00a0 And there was no suggestion of analyze<\/i> in place of analyse.<\/p>\n

No, what had triggered his fulmination was the use of parking lot<\/i>, sidewalk<\/i>, and railroad<\/i> (and a few other Americanisms) where British and Commonwealth English would have used car park, pavement (or footpath), and railway.<\/p>\n

At first, I thought: fair enough.\u00a0 Just because American writers (and American readers) have a penchant for pants rather than trousers and airplanes rather than aeroplanes, that doesn\u2019t make it correct to use these words throughout the English-speaking world.<\/p>\n

But on further reflection, I wasn\u2019t so sure.<\/p>\n

A handful of English English words had their origins in England \u2013 or at least in one of the several proto-states and regions that eventually became England.\u00a0 But many more words were adapted from German and Latin.\u00a0 Later, Norman French contributed a large number of words relating to governance and public administration.\u00a0 And then, during the second half of the second millennium, many more words were \u2018borrowed\u2019 from the languages of India and Malaya and China and \u2026 well, you see what I mean.<\/p>\n

I suppose there must have been a time when the purists thought that veranda was just plain wrong.\u00a0 \u2018Veranda?\u00a0 Surely you mean portico!\u2019\u00a0 (Or perhaps gallery?)\u00a0 But today both veranda and portico are perfectly acceptable in English English.\u00a0 And dinghy didn\u2019t exactly condemn rowing boat to the scrapheap, so I\u2019m not sure that rowboat will either.<\/p>\n

English is packed to the gunwales with clumps of words that are almost interchangeable.\u00a0 If big means big, why do we need large, huge, enormous, vast, massive, and immense?<\/p>\n

I think that I shall continue to call a pavement a pavement.\u00a0 But if you want to call it a sidewalk, and you\u2019re happy that your reader will know exactly what you mean, that\u2019s perfectly OK with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My dining companion was fulminating against the use of American English. The particular document that was causing him so much distress contained no American spelling.\u00a0 There was no sign of color in place of colour.\u00a0 And there was no suggestion … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":823,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions\/823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}