The Virgin Prince's War Journal
The grim and gritty side of things. If everyone had a soundtrack to their lives, mine would be the best.
Friday, December 12, 2003
Hot Lesbian Strap-On Action!
Some of you may have noticed inconsistencies in the word spellings in my posts. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, the spell-check on my computer at work is set to British spelling, while the computer at my home uses the superior American dictionary. I hate British spelling. Among the flaws contained within the British written language is their overuse of the letter U in words where it isn’t needed. Words like “colour”, which we spell “color”. (Agh! The spell check is doing it right now! Leave my words alone you British beast!)
The British also like to make words unnecessarily long and add “E”s to the end of things. What is a “shop” to us becomes “shoppe” to them, “point” to “pointe”. I could be wrong about this. My point is, keep it simple. The Japanese spell words like they sound, which is something I think perhaps we should put a little effort towards trying. Of course, the Japanese alphabet is horrendously large and I think we’re better off sticking with our single consonant and vowel symbols, as opposed to their combined consonant and vowel symbols (ba be bi bo bu, repeat 16 times with d, f, g, h, j, k, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z, and then probably with even more symbols I don’t know about.)
What’s with the backwards “re” the British dictionary uses so much? That doesn’t sound how it looks! I much prefer our “meter” to their “metre” and our “liter” to their “litre”, though I must admit to preferring “theatre” as it does look far more regal, which is appropriate, being that theatres are generally places of culture.
What is with the British overuse of the letter S? Why must “practiced” be “practised” and “sympathize” be “sympathise” to them? The letter Z is terribly underused! And a fine letter it is! Let’s get some variety out there, Britain!
Not that American spelling is perfect. As a young lad I can recall deliberately losing a spelling bee because I took offense to the spellings of “dessert” and “desert”, thinking the spellings should be reversed. Being that “desert” is pronounced “deh-zert”, it was my firm belief that it should be spelled “dessert”. This is of course because dual consonants are supposed to follow soft vowels while single consonants follow strong vowels. For example, “later” (lA-ter) and “latter” (la-ter). Growing up, I always heard the word “dessert” pronounced “dE-zert”, hence my feelings that the word should only have one “S”. In the years since, I’ve come to accept that some people actually do pronounce it “des-zert” and have let my grudge go, submissively accepting the spelling.
One thing you may have noticed about my posts is that I only type “it’s” and never “its” and I’ll tell you why. There’s the two spellings for the two uses of the word, one, “its” pertaining to something’s ownership of something, and “it’s”, a contraction of “it is”. I say both have a right to an apostrophe! Obviously, contracted words always have apostrophes in the middle of them, indicating two merged words (like “don’t” for “do not”), but that’s not all! When something is “John’s”, it belongs to John. When something is the “giraffe’s” it belongs to the giraffe. When something belongs to it, should it not be “it’s”? Okay, granted “his” and “hers” break the rules, but SCREW THAT CRAP! Damn right I’m going to use an apostrophe.
My solution is this: the English-speaking countries of the world should pay me a million dollars each to rewrite all their words. I will create superior “Virgin Spelling”. Words that sound like they’re spelled! I’ll just sit down with a few dictionaries and in a few years I’ll be done. Sounds good to me! Granted, the new way will take some getting used to, but come on, admit it, wouldn’t you love to see the Dixie Chicks written about as performing “cuntry music”?
In an unrelated story, I was yelled at by my teacher in my 4th grade class once because I corrected her for wrongly phrasing a vocabulary word (“tail” was the word) during the middle of a dictation test. Ms. Boyd (as I recall her being named) had said something about, “I told a TAIL blah, blah, blah”. We had a predetermined set of vocabulary words and if we wrote the sentence CORRECTLY we would be marked as wrong. Personally, I thought it was outright irresponsible and immoral for a teacher to be teaching kids to use words the wrong way, but heck, I was just a 4th grader. Maybe this fully grown and officially educated teacher was right to screw with the kids’ understanding of the definitions and spellings of words.
I suppose I’ve always been a bit anal about words.
The British also like to make words unnecessarily long and add “E”s to the end of things. What is a “shop” to us becomes “shoppe” to them, “point” to “pointe”. I could be wrong about this. My point is, keep it simple. The Japanese spell words like they sound, which is something I think perhaps we should put a little effort towards trying. Of course, the Japanese alphabet is horrendously large and I think we’re better off sticking with our single consonant and vowel symbols, as opposed to their combined consonant and vowel symbols (ba be bi bo bu, repeat 16 times with d, f, g, h, j, k, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z, and then probably with even more symbols I don’t know about.)
What’s with the backwards “re” the British dictionary uses so much? That doesn’t sound how it looks! I much prefer our “meter” to their “metre” and our “liter” to their “litre”, though I must admit to preferring “theatre” as it does look far more regal, which is appropriate, being that theatres are generally places of culture.
What is with the British overuse of the letter S? Why must “practiced” be “practised” and “sympathize” be “sympathise” to them? The letter Z is terribly underused! And a fine letter it is! Let’s get some variety out there, Britain!
Not that American spelling is perfect. As a young lad I can recall deliberately losing a spelling bee because I took offense to the spellings of “dessert” and “desert”, thinking the spellings should be reversed. Being that “desert” is pronounced “deh-zert”, it was my firm belief that it should be spelled “dessert”. This is of course because dual consonants are supposed to follow soft vowels while single consonants follow strong vowels. For example, “later” (lA-ter) and “latter” (la-ter). Growing up, I always heard the word “dessert” pronounced “dE-zert”, hence my feelings that the word should only have one “S”. In the years since, I’ve come to accept that some people actually do pronounce it “des-zert” and have let my grudge go, submissively accepting the spelling.
One thing you may have noticed about my posts is that I only type “it’s” and never “its” and I’ll tell you why. There’s the two spellings for the two uses of the word, one, “its” pertaining to something’s ownership of something, and “it’s”, a contraction of “it is”. I say both have a right to an apostrophe! Obviously, contracted words always have apostrophes in the middle of them, indicating two merged words (like “don’t” for “do not”), but that’s not all! When something is “John’s”, it belongs to John. When something is the “giraffe’s” it belongs to the giraffe. When something belongs to it, should it not be “it’s”? Okay, granted “his” and “hers” break the rules, but SCREW THAT CRAP! Damn right I’m going to use an apostrophe.
My solution is this: the English-speaking countries of the world should pay me a million dollars each to rewrite all their words. I will create superior “Virgin Spelling”. Words that sound like they’re spelled! I’ll just sit down with a few dictionaries and in a few years I’ll be done. Sounds good to me! Granted, the new way will take some getting used to, but come on, admit it, wouldn’t you love to see the Dixie Chicks written about as performing “cuntry music”?
In an unrelated story, I was yelled at by my teacher in my 4th grade class once because I corrected her for wrongly phrasing a vocabulary word (“tail” was the word) during the middle of a dictation test. Ms. Boyd (as I recall her being named) had said something about, “I told a TAIL blah, blah, blah”. We had a predetermined set of vocabulary words and if we wrote the sentence CORRECTLY we would be marked as wrong. Personally, I thought it was outright irresponsible and immoral for a teacher to be teaching kids to use words the wrong way, but heck, I was just a 4th grader. Maybe this fully grown and officially educated teacher was right to screw with the kids’ understanding of the definitions and spellings of words.
I suppose I’ve always been a bit anal about words.
