Comment by blenderob
5 days ago
I read several blogs that use British English, including this OP's blog. Some of my favourite blogs in my RSS reader are British English blogs, or at least they use British English spellings and grammar. I find their use of the English language very charming and funny in a unique way.
It surprises me that anyone would feel entitled to ask a blogger to change the variety of English they use. American English is only one of many forms of English. The world is richer for its many varieties of English, and languages, and that diversity makes it more interesting, not less.
Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished. Diversity is only a good thing when your mind has been poisoned by "education" and "experience".
It requires an open mind to see diverse experiences as a good thing, and certain cultures think having citizens with open minds is an unprofitable way to run a society.
Ok, I take the bait. Which ones?
Just today
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/mandarin-...
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The one where I live :(
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More approachable framing: tribalism (generally accepted human tendency) is inherently anti-diversity.
Have you never met a pro ICE person from USA?
Is it bait? I'm pretty sure it's a reasonably factual, albeit general claim. Asking chatGPT for country-specific examples for instance gives this:
> Yes—some countries have (at various times, and in some cases still today) adopted policies aimed at making the population more “homogeneous,” through segregation, assimilation pressure, or exclusion/deportation. Concrete examples:
- South Africa (apartheid era, 1948–1990s): An official system of racial classification and enforced separation (“separate development”).
- Germany (Nazi period, 1933–1945): State ideology enforced a racial hierarchy and pursued forced removal and mass murder of those deemed “undesirable.”
- Israel (state policies affecting Palestinian citizens and occupied territory, especially since 1967): Includes laws and administrative practices that many observers describe as producing or enforcing unequal status by group; key issues include citizenship status differences and restrictions tied to national/ethnic identity.
- Myanmar (Rohingya): Policies and law enforcement that stripped/blocked citizenship for Rohingya and enabled persecution, culminating in mass violence and displacement.
- Canada (Indigenous assimilation policy, especially 19th–20th century into 1996): Forced assimilation via residential schools and bans on language/cultural practices; many have characterized this as cultural genocide.
- United States (Jim Crow + earlier immigration/citizenship rules; and internment): Historical legal regimes created segregation and restricted citizenship/naturalization based on race/national origin (e.g., earlier Asian-exclusion immigration restrictions).
You may disagree with some examples on this list, but I'm sure even you would consider that the first two are clear examples of diversity-fearing 'cultures' rather than 'bait'. And this is even before considering the wider definition of the word 'culture', which can be even more exclusionary.
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Ok sure. The Home Secretary just banned new asylum seeker housing near schools and nurseries, fyi.
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Historically many (predominantly muslim) places in near and middle east have been very diverse, though maybe not exactly the kind of diversity usually conceptualised in the west. If anything, the idea of homogeneous nation states is more like rooted in the enlightenment.
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I'm fairly sure they were referring to the americans that this post is about
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You’d be surprised how much radical Islam and the American far right have in common.
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You look around the world, including the rise of far-right parties across the Western world who talk about the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, and the first example you reach for is Islamic cultures?
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Right. As a Brit I am entitled to think we speak the best version (because we do; ISE is a close second) but I am not entitled to believe everyone else's is wrong, because that is ahistorical. They have diverged repeatedly and thus ours is one of the divergences.
Much of British English was standardised long after several waves of the US settlers left our shores, so US english has some traits of pre-standardised English dialects, and ours is different again.
It's equally silly when some Americans claim their English is closer to the "true" English as a result, because, again, there was really no standardised "true" English when they left.
Along with some simplifications and some things reintroduced from german settlers, it has some traits of older English that the British abandoned in our own simplification of the language.
Is ours the best? Of course it bloody is :-) But is it "true" English? No more than anyone else's. That is the enormous power of English.
What is ISE?
I mean Indian Standard English here.
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I agree in general, but there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. This means roughly the opposite in British and US English, and there's often insufficient surrounding context to alert the reader to their error.
(OTOH I don't think you should suppress 'false friends' like biscuits, pants etc.)
>there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'.
Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".
I'm British but I always understood it as the second meaning. e.g. "We were going to consider XYZ but now it's a moot point because the project is cancelled."
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There are a few others. “Quite” comes to mind — “I am quite hungry” or “that meal was quite good” can mean opposite things, depending on the speaker region and even voice inflexion if spoken.
Once you start going in that direction, a lot of things that British people say can require some amount of translation, see e.g. this table: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:640/format:webp/0*0Fs1...
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Quite, indeed, has no simple meaning in British English. Any non-British attempt to assign one meaning that is different to their regional meaning is doomed to failure :-)
I use it in different senses all the time.
Imagine someone wrote a blog in some obscure language that few people speak. If you happen to know that language, you'd think wow this is great. If you don't happen to know that language, you'd just think it's a shame. This is the same thing, just to a lesser degree. Some people might be interested in putting in the effort to learn a bunch of foreign cultural references, but not everyone.
They did not say someone asked them to write American English.
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>Speaking is even worse: a diarrhea of filler words, like 'like', 'I mean', and 'you know'.
and the british have: obviously, innit, fam, right, know what I mean, etc
Actually, it's "either the word 'whom' or when to use it". I guess you should learn actual English.