Trash or Rubbish?
- FIX MY ENGLISH!!!
Colour or color?
Socks or sox? Organisations or Organizations? Underground or subway? Gas or petrol?
Fall or Autumn? Candy or sweets? Cookie or biscuit?
Centre or Center, Trash or rubbish? Boot or Trunk?
And we're living in a
world where the frontiers between these 'regional differences' are becoming
more and more blurred.
In my home, as in
millions of others around the world, English is clearly a language that is
moving and changing as fast as the times we live in. English speakers living in
Bombay Brighton or Boston
Although we have a rich
global mapping of English which makes it possible for English speakers to
almost immediately fix a fellow English speaker to a geographical area, there
is more that is similar among these English variations than is dissimilar.
If there wasn't, English
speakers from different parts of the world would have absolutely no hope of
understanding each other! In most cases it is pronunciation and idiomatic
expressions, not vocabulary or grammar that makes a fellow English speaker from
another part of the world, or sometimes even another part of the country,
difficult to understand.
The important thing to
remember is that while spelling 'remember' as 'rember' is definitely wrong,
spelling 'socks' as 'sox' is not! That saying 'She speak English really well'
is definitely wrong wherever you are (the verb 'speak' must be third person
'speaks' or used in another tense such as 'spoke'), saying 'She speaks English
real well' may not be wrong (it is acceptable to use 'real' rather than
'really' in informal American English.)
Conclusion: Adopt to flexibility
we see in English now. Queen’s English, mindset of PAST now!!!
