I am Canadian and I still think this is dumb as hell

@liquidprince said:

Yeah... Loonies get heavy and weigh down your wallet =/

sore E aboot that, eh I'll get right on dropping the U

It's Zed. Pretty sure the credits in Men In Black will back me up on that one, and if we can't trust the makers of Men In Black who the fuck can we trust?

"My Lord", and it was "Aluminum" first. But if we're speaking in absolute firsts, it was alumium.

But hey.

No one's judging here.

Why drop the U? Why not drop the O instead?

Flavur, honur, harbur etc. That's way better.

@mariachimacabre said:

Still. No more wondering how to pronounce a word, ever. Doesn't that sound great?! The US is missing an official language anyway, right? Because I've got a good candidate right here. If Obama got behind that, I don't think anyone would complain.

Common usage changes things. When -ough was a fresh-faced young sequence it got pronounced every time, but it's hard to maintain the hype for five hundred years. Also, it sounds fucking stupid. Unfortunately, bringing the spelling back in line with pronunciation gives us gems like "thru" and "tho" and that shit srsly f'ing sux, ffs lol omg u guys.

Orthography has always been dumb.

There's bigger things to worry about, like the fact that Alexa Ray Corriea of Polygon, an English Major and official reporter of news for that site, insists on pronouncing the word cache (in the context of website archives) as "cash-ay" in Friday's Speed Run segment. I thought it was just a stream of conscious mistake, however she took it one step further and used the term in the past tense as "cash-ay-ed" a word that actually does not even exist, like at all....ever. Now thousands of impressionable young duders who no longer make the effort to read articles but instead make the minimal effort to keep their eyes open while words are read to their ears in video format will assume that is the correct pronunciation and before you know it the word kashayed will appear in American dictionaries as the proper spelling (the original and proper spelling would probably just be cached (read: cash-ed) somewhere) and some annoying Canadian (like yours truly) will be all up in the threads making frivolous Internet grammar complaints while eating Lay's Ketchup chips, drinking Mott's Clamato Juice Caesars, and mourning the demise of the eternally useful and eco-friendly milk bag. We did give the world Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon so not all will have been in vain....

I'm Canadian and I agree with the both of you.

If the way a women on Polygon chooses to pronounce a particular word (or non-word as the case may be) ends up changing the dictionary spelling of said word, I'd say we'd have much more important things to worry about than the supposed decay of the English language.

Like, OH GOD WHO IS THIS WOMAN AND HOW IS SHE DOING THIS.

embrace your british heritage. i'm american, and i wish we used the extraneous 'u.'

in short, canada is great.

Fuck American spellings. Nite?

It's Night.

Pretty much. Australians use the U as well - similarly, because we speak and write in English, not American.

You're on to something, let's take it one step further, one vowel to rule them all!

oh excuse me I mean;

Yuu'ru un tu sumuthung, lut's tuku ut unu stup furthur, unu vuwul tu rulu thum ull!

Yuuh bubu nuw yuur tulkung.

Treason!

Well, to be fair, if the person who originally named a thing goes through iterations and ends up on a "final" name, I would argue that that is what we should use. The man settled on Aluminium in the end, and that is what matters - the weird countersurgence of "Aluminum" in the States seemed to be due to just societal preference.

I believe we're both referring to this article?

The metal was named by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy (who, you may recall, “abominated gravy, and lived in the odium of having discovered sodium”), even though he was unable to isolate it: that took another two decades’ work by others. He derived the name from the mineral called alumina, which itself had only been named in English by the chemist Joseph Black in 1790. Black took it from the French, who had based it on alum, a white mineral that had been used since ancient times for dyeing and tanning, among other things. Chemically, this is potassium aluminium sulphate (a name which gives me two further opportunities to parade my British spellings of chemical names).

Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling italumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling onaluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminiumright from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in –ium, like potassium, sodium, andmagnesium, all of which had been named by Davy.

Um...Americans spell it "Night". Where the hell did you hear otherwise? The only time I've seen it spelled Nite is on seedy motel signs that only spell it like that to save space and electricity. Like "drive-thru."

Just so everybody is clear, milk in the US is subsidized by the government. It is not, however, in Canada. So milk is more expensive in Canada. Which is why they try and cut costs in other areas, such as putting milk in cheaper bags, as opposed to cartons or plastic jugs.

All I'm trying to say is, fuck you Canadians for coming across the border and over-running my Costco and taking all my milk. Stop it. I love Canada, and the people in it, but you've turned my Costco into a shithole!

Sure, Canada has milk in a bag but what about beer in a bag, eh?

@rebgav: Not chunks and it was not sour. Still good just weird....also I was probably 13

@chocolaterhinovampire: GTFO of my country!

Oh, you mean that you were probably drunk. Got it.

yeah and country can become cuntry! I like it.

Bagged milk is not a win for Canada at all. I live in Wisconsin so I know a thing or two about milk.

Eh?

IT PUTS THE U'S IN THE WORDS OR ELSE IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN!

It's just something we stuck with, there's no real reason to get rid of it.

I'm American and I exclusively use the "u" variants of words. So you're wrong.

Why is Canadian milk so expensive? That's like twice as expensive as it is in the UK.

I would like to defer to the English since, you know, English is named after the people the language came from.

Everything but electronics is more expensive here in my experience

Please never use "I am Canadian" in a sentence again, thanks.

- Every other Canadian.

Oh, hey, while we're still on "This Is Canada," how do people in Canada give money to... ladies of impropriety? In America, it's customary to slip the bills beneath various elastic strings.

Do Canadian strippers wear coin dispensing belts?

Really?

I've always seen it spelled Nite in reference to the states. I thought it was just stupid, but now I see that not everyone spells it that way.

@mlarrabee said:

Oh, hey, while we're still on "This Is Canada," how do people in Canada give money to... ladies of impropriety? In America, it's customary to slip the bills beneath various elastic strings.

Do Canadian strippers wear coin dispensing belts?

If you give strippers $1 bills you are a cheap ass person and need to leave the club.

the best kind

Woah, that's crazy. Milk is $2 / 2L here in Australia and is usually sold in bottles. I don't think we have any cartons >1.2L either. I guess the Canadian dairy industry is smaller or you have some weird back end taxes on making cartons.

@jay_ray: Are there other kinds of people in strip clubs?

@penguindust said:

Sure, Canada has milk in a bag but what about beer in a bag, eh?

hey man- i'd drink a beer in a bag without breaking a sweat. ready for me to blow your mind? that cheap-ass box-wine we sometimes imbibe? IT'S ACTUALLY

BAAAAAG WIIIIIIIIINE! CUE THE

No and ZED is awesome.

You mean the Germanic peoples, right? Because that's where English came from.

i kind of like dialects and variations in spelling, pronunciation etc.

i don't think language ought to be a static thing.

No one spells it that way in the US. Again, only in shorthand or I guess text messages but everything is spelled wrong in text messages from teenagers.

I find the hate for bagged milk here weird, for all the hate people have about losing the penny for fear of paying more for things.

I'll let you in on a secret guys: With bagged milk you get more milk for less money. Doesn't seem like such a dumb decision to me, but what do I know I'm a rational human being.

I don't know what all of that is about but, in my experience, the performers at my local energy drink bars are not adorned with any sort of elasticated money-holding paraphernalia and attempting to slip anything anywhere is most assuredly discouraged. They tend to frown on that. I would hope that Canadian peelers are equally sacrosanct and... naked, though I'd imagine that a Canadian strip club is cold in every conceivable way.

why don't you just sell meat in shoes

milk in bags pfft what is that

Phonetically speaking, I don't see how either variant of colour makes more sense than the other. Would it not have to be something like "culler" to be phonetic?

I'm pretty sure the whole 'America dumbing down' is just their way of cutting ties with the brits, or it may have something to do with the french.

I think that's why yanks drive on the right side of the road? not sure.
Anyone the brits colonized drives on left, because in the oldy times horsemen were right handed, so riding on the left gave them a clear shot.
French.. Napoleon was left handed so went right side, anyone they colonized done that.

All of the above may be wrong.
in short.. the U is either America being different because brits, or the surrender monkeys, or neither