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I am confused. Maybe it's an age thing so please help me out. America is obsessed with hacking the English language to make it simpler and more phonetic. You know lets take the word colour and drop the "u" because we don't hear it :-) etc etc etc. They like to hack at most things but let's stay with language. Forget an infant nation having the odacity to want to police the world and lend a hand in the midlle east. I mean China has been around for 5000 years but they.... . So let's talk the about the weather. One simple example is that USA weather stations invariably talk "precipitation". Why are substituting a one syllable word "rain" say, for a mouthful of 5 syllables. Now is this consistent with their desire for simple user friendly lingua and if so please enlighten me and tell me why? Inverted wisdom maybe I have a bad feeling it's just another mess. MAXIM here is - USA takes something and makes it worse. Countless examples here but let's not even go there. If you are going to hack at something then try to do it with style.
PS. Quantity does not and never will mean quality. I fear that America will sell out quality and leave us a world where quality will become a myth, found in fairy tales and superstition. Hoping I'll be long gone before this happens on a world scale.

Yet another can of worms?

Yeah, it's a can of worms. People reading this might think you have a chip on your shoulder re. America, or something...

Please not another America-bashing-thread. If you want to have a discourse about American English vs. Her Majesty's English, let's have it over at the languages thread. I'm moving this over.

IMO it's natural for a language to evolve over time, and much as I'm annoyed at my text editor's imposed American spelling, it's not as if there aren't plenty of dialects around in the UK which mangle the language, eh?

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Originally posted by whalewatcher:
Yeah, it's a can of worms. People reading this might think you have a chip on your shoulder re. America, or something...

If you want to have a discourse about American English vs. Her Majesty's English, let's have it over at the languages thread. I'm moving this over.

Much as I'm personally annoyed at my text editor's imposed American spelling, it's not as if there aren't plenty of local English dialects around in the UK, eh?

Dude I love diversity. Sure the UK is rich in dialects but nobody in Wales or Cornwall, say, wishes to hack the common language. I am just confused about why America wishes to change something as old as the English language. Justification for changes seems kind of non - well founded. Don't you agree? My shoulders are too old to carry chips. I have been up and down 6000m peaks in Sichuan too many times for extraneous debris. Old things can be cool too. I don't have time for this to turn into an epic. If you cannot see the heart of the matter then I apologize for being incapable of lucidity. NOT

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please enlighten me and tell me why?

Here is the answer that you are ostensibly looking for.

Thanks static - nice reference, but hey what's with the weather station people dude? lol

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what's with the weather station people dude?

The "weather station dude" is a Meteorologist, and uses that word on purpose.
Here is your answer. Topic closed.

I think the answer is fairly self-evident: American English has adapted for a better set of teeth.

Topic is now closed.