Home, Home on the Strange
So it’s black and white decor, now, which, Alice, is perhaps a tad ironic? Always pretty much my favourite, though my significant other won’t allow me to do the same with our living space.
Significant others. There’s a theme for a thread, surely.
Mine has this passion for relocating things, changing furniture around, and tidiness. Can’t count the number of times I’ve come home, thrown myself exhausted upon the bed, and missed. Okay, not quite so bad, but it’s come close.
And here’s another, different thing. I’m English. I write English English as opposed to American English. A US teacher would spank me, I’m sure, for using English English (henceforward E.E) spellings, whilst an E.E teacher would no doubt do the same if I spelled things the American Way.
When I spelled ‘favourite’ earlier my spell-check underlined it, and has again, so I made my ‘favourite’ ‘favorite’ and the spell-check took no exception. But I’m an E.E writer, so I’ve changed ‘favorite’ back to ‘favourite’ and I’ve now got a red line per line here…
I’m not going to switch, I’ve decided, to US English for the sake of the spell-checker. I know perfectly well the majority audience is entirely able to cope with E.E spellings, even if, to some of them, they do look a bit odd.
Update? I am still trying to get vraimenterotique.com, my former site, transferred over here or whatever. I’m working on and hopefully putting the finishing touches to two novels, the M/F “The Sword of Don Alejandro” and the M/M “Islands” and a couple of novellas. I’m hoping to start publishing fairly soon in e-book form.
Anyone out there got serious peeves about e-books?
Affection, always,
R V R
5 responses to “Home, Home on the Strange”
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R V Raiment 
Hi again,
The dictionary (and others who deal with such things) call your English “BE,” for British English, and mine AE (for American English). Australians, then, even though their English is a thing of their own, are considered to use BE. It’s BE in India, and as a second language in Europe; the Canadians are mostly AE, although not in their spellings. And so on.
Are you using MS Word? If so, you should be able to select BE as your dictionary option, and thus get rid of the red lines, which could become annoying after a while! I can’t remember exactly how to do it, but if you can’t find it, let me know and I’ll figure it out. I work for both British and American publishers, so I change the dictionary option around so the spellcheck will catch different things for me.
Hello Shar and thank you.
I did kind of know about the interchangeability thing, but my input here is directly into the blog and I’m not sure if that’s adjustable 🙂 Truth is, I guess, I’m ready to put up with a few red lines here if it means I can keep my ‘Englishness’ though it matters less than when I’m writing an English historical piece. That’s where Word comes in, I guess. I’ve just been editing a piece about the First World War that contains a lot of Yorkshire dialect, and even though Word’s automatic checks are set to ‘English’ it looks as if it’s close to some kind of mental breakdown.
Lovely to hear from you,
RVR
Ah….. well, with WordPress, I guess you’ll have to conform to their Imperialist ways! Or cut and paste, and then close your eyes. I even get a red squiggly line under the word WordPress, and that is with their preferred capitalizations… or capitalisations, if you prefer.
It’s hard to choose, sometimes, whether to go BE or AE. I recently read a story that was published with BE conventions (British spellings, the single quotes instead of double quotes for conversations, etc.), and it made sense because the publisher was British. But… the story was set (very obviously) in the US. I happen to know the author is American. The characters seemed to be very “American.” So given that, the Britishness of the text made me smile sometimes.
You may know that there are scores of Americans who enjoy reading British fiction precisely because of those small linguistic differences. A minor thrill, but a thrill nonetheless!
I don’t like it when British books are “Americanized” for sale here; I think Americans are perfectly capable, for example, of grasping a title like “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” There is no need to change “Philosopher.” Give us a few dictionaries, and we’ll figure it out eventually. 😉
I should do a whole blog post on the AE/BE thing.
Sounds like a great idea to me. Just let me know when it’s posted so I can read it 🙂
I’m still really puzzled by the quotes thing. I’m sure I was taught at school – half a century ago – to use double quotes for dialogue, but it seems to have got changed somewhere, somehow, or my memory is blitzed.
I love the British ways of spelling certain words. It just seems cooler to this American. 😉