Scottish Students Used Spellchecker Glitch To Cheat In Literacy Test (bbc.com) 167
Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Schools are to be given advice on how to disable a glitch that allows pupils sitting online spelling tests to right-click their mouse and find the answer. It follows the discovery by teachers that children familiar with traditional computer spellcheckers were simply applying it to the tests. The Scottish National Standardized Assessments were introduced to assess progress in four different age groups. A spokesman said the issue was not with the Scottish National Standardized Assessments (SNSA) but with browser or device settings on some machines.
Introduced in 2017, the spelling test asks children to identify misspelt words. However, on some school computers the words were highlighted with a red line. Pupils who right-clicked on the words were then able to access the correct spelling. The web-based SNSA tool enables teachers to administer online literacy and numeracy tests for pupils in P1, P4, P7 and S3, which are marked and scored automatically. Advice is being given to schools about how to disable the spellchecking function.
Introduced in 2017, the spelling test asks children to identify misspelt words. However, on some school computers the words were highlighted with a red line. Pupils who right-clicked on the words were then able to access the correct spelling. The web-based SNSA tool enables teachers to administer online literacy and numeracy tests for pupils in P1, P4, P7 and S3, which are marked and scored automatically. Advice is being given to schools about how to disable the spellchecking function.
Some spell checkers ... (Score:3)
... suck worse at spelling than students, though.
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Spell checkers particularly suck at British English. We accept both -ize and -ise, with the former being the Oxford standard that I prefer. But most spell checkers only know -ise for English.
Eye Halve a Spelling Chequer (Score:5, Funny)
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its really ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it's weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
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Normally a bad spell checker will give you congestion of properly spelt words, just not the correct word in context.
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Shift+F10 also works
Single button (Score:2)
If those computers have two-button mice, then replacing the mice with one-button mice might work.
For an extremely long time on PCs :
"Main button" : gives you a "left"-click
"2nd button" OR "main button" + "shift" : gives you a "right"-click
"3rd button" OR "2nd button + main button" OR "main button" + "ctrl" : gives you a "middle" click.
(I even have manuals of DOS games explaining this).
I saddly don't have a single button mouse handy to test if that still works in 2018 OSes.
But the "two button" for "middle click" definitely works on my laptop on Linux.
On mac :
Most modern single bouton Apple mice have ca
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follilize, not fossilise
Not so sure about this one.
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I'm assuming the spellchecker flagged it, but the poster assumed it was exactly the false positive they were complaining about? Or didn't flag it, for the same reason.
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I'm assuming the spellchecker flagged it, but the poster assumed it was exactly the false positive they were complaining about?
Yep. ("fossilise". Egad, it got it right!)
(The keyboard and trackpad on this machine is why I plan never to buy another Lenovo. It keeps jumping the cursor on my while I'm typing and I don't always catch and fix the resulting havoc.)
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You people know you can change trackpad settings so that clicking requires pushing, double tapping, etc., right?
I could rewrite the whole opsystem if I felt like it (and had several lifetimes in a no-time-passes-in-the-main-timeline siding to do it on.
If such configuration is already available it's not exported to the stock GUI configuration tool, When that happens I usually don't dig for some other configuration tuner - because that usually turns the stock tuner into "open it and the option it didsn't kno
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Follilize: transitive verb: turning the subject into a folly :)
Re:Some spell checkers ... (Score:4, Funny)
British Empire, English
There's no such fucking language.
In the UK we speak English. Unless you're speaking scouser, brummie, geordie, etc. In India they speak English but it's got very little grammar in common with English. In Canada they speak English but with a funny accent and some new words. In New Zealand they speak English but differently. In Australia they speak English and add new swear words (then cheat at cricket). In Kenya they speak English and are jolly nice too. In South Africa they speak English and kill each other.
There is no fucking British Empire English.
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Yo. Dudes! We split from the British Empire before dictionaries and were invented and standardized spelling began to be promoted
Our friend Samuel Johnson [wikipedia.org] might want to speak to you on that one, as his Dictionary of the English Language [wikipedia.org] came a good 20 years before the American War of Independence.
Scottish National Standardized Assessments (Score:2)
outsourced by fools... think of the children... (Score:2)
shock horror someone in the education department is not very educated
In the freaking standard and supported by many browsers :
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#spelling-and-grammar-checking
They never tested it and I'll bet its not accessible to low vision or disabled ( alternative inputs) either...
however it is at least better than a native windows app which would lock the school into paying for Microsoft word...
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When it comes to using technology to subvert the education system it's always safe to assume the children know a fuck of a lot more than the teachers.
At a school you'll have maybe three teachers that have the background, interest and skills to look into this shit. You'll have 300 children, and once one knows, they all know.
That's the thing about schools, they're full of people that when appropriately motivated are fucking good at learning things.
Re:outsourced by fools... think of the children... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shore that is a grate whey too git the deer kids inn two a university coarse.
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Sure, that is a great way to get the kids into a university course.
I "typed" the previous sentence using the free text to speech feature on my laptop, on one try, and without any manual interference. I also typed these two sentences in the same way, with the exception of fixing one word and adding quotes to another.
Besides, anyone can tell what you wrote were the wrong words at a glance. That's a much easier task than spelling something like "capricious" correctly.
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Failure to spell homophones correctly will get your resume binned. Or are you pretending people use Siri to write resumes too?
Re:outsourced by fools... think of the children... (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by resumes I've read as of late, I'm amazed if they used anything else.
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True. I had a colleague, very smart, literate and articulate. He couldn't write well for the life of him (he much later confessed he was mildly dyslexic), so I was proofreading his e-mails.
I'm not the best at English, with it not being my native language, but I make efforts to not mess up (and still do, sometimes, especially when tired).
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Shore that is a grate whey too git the deer kids inn two a university coarse.
THIS!
It's completely misspelled, of course. For those who claim spelling isn't important it's obvious that, with a bit of effort, one can understand the intent of the statement. However, it takes much longer to process the sentence.
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Assume you never learnt any Math. How the hell are you going to know how to use a calculator? What do any of the operators mean? Some calculators have a "1/x" button, but some use "x^-1", how would you know that they are the same thing? Would you know the difference between degrees and radians? Or fractions vs. decimal representation?
Unless you think an automated program can also tell you what Math you want to do before you do it? Even an AI singularity won't be psychic.
Even just mental arithmetic is a usef
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What that ability gives you is a moment's pause when the figures the calculator gives you aren't within the magnitude or narrower range your head-arithmatic thinks is close to the answer. Then you go over your figures and either find you made an entry mistake, or learn something new about number relationships.
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I did no such thing. Read my comment again, and the one I responded to.
I am an EE, I do MATH for a living and I would be painfully slow at my job if I could not do basic ARITHMETIC in my head. Over time I (and most people) have developed mental shortcuts from common patterns that will always be much much faster than a calculator.
Again, I'll make the same challenge to you as I did to the GP. Remember, if you don't teach arithmetic then you can't do ANY arithmetic in your head. Everything comes from a calcula
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If instead of spending 5 years studying arithmetic, you spent 1 week studying economics, you'd know that everything comes at a cost. All that time spent on simple arithmetic is really only useful for a handful of jobs. Meanwhile, a year of critical thinking, personal finance or cooking would benefit almost everyone for a lifetime.
And just for fun, here's my counter challenge to you:
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Kids need to learn arithmetic to form the mental pathways that will later be used for real math.
e.g. If a kid can't add fractions, (s)he will be _lost_ when it comes time to add two algebraic formulas. Then the kid is _doomed_ to live an innumerate life. College major choices will be limited to 'basket weaving' type subjects.
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If you don't teach kids how to spell, then they will just use emoji to convey their thoughts. In the corporate world, this is completely unprofessional.
For the moment...
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For the moment...
The moment has passed. A lot of the new fangled tools, like github enterprise, whatever the latest chat client du jour is etc support emojis now.
The unprofessional youth of today will become old farts of tomorrow and in their turn will complain about how using emojis is the professional thing not whatever the kids of today are using (smell-o-vision?).
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If you don't teach kids how to spell, then they will just use emoji to convey their thoughts. In the corporate world, this is completely unprofessional.
Emojis are a far more compact. A single Unicode emoji can convey as much information as several dozen words, with fewer keystrokes and fewer bits to transmit. They are only considered "unprofessional" for cultural reasons. Once the baby boomer executives retire, and the Millennials are running things, emojis will be fully accepted by corporate America.
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You've spent too much time in China. We do not want logograms. They are not good.
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If Lennart Poettering invented a language, it would use logograms.
(Firefox's shitty spielchucker doesn't think that's a word. It also doesn't think "Firefox's" is)
Re:outsourced by fools... think of the children... (Score:5, Insightful)
At my job, being at least 10 years older that any colleagues of mine, writing correctly has become unprofessional. Someone mentioned that my writing was "pretentious" and that I was showing off.
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At your job, the meaning of professional writing has evolved. Your writing hasn't. Your unwillingness to adjust to the culture you work in out of some presumed sense of superiority makes you pretentious.
In your first sentence, the position of the subordinate clause, "being at least 10 years older that[sic] any colleagues..." implies that your job is at least ten years older than any of your colleagues are. To express that you have been alive for at least ten years longer than your colleagues, try, "At my
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Thank you for correcting me. Now please try writing a phrase in Romanian, which is my native language :)
I assume the "that" instead of "than", and I blame the 3AM local time my clock was showing.
I had no idea about spelling out numbers lower than 13, it doesn't look like a hard rule or something that needs to be enforced. But I'm willing to learn, so please help me by providing some data to support it.
About the comma: again I haven't encountered a hard rule around this. With so many variants of English exis
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Thank you for correcting me. Now please try writing a phrase in Romanian, which is my native language :)
Fair enough. All snark in my previous post hereby retracted. My apologies!
I assume the "that" instead of "than", and I blame the 3AM local time my clock was showing.
Happens to the best of us...
I had no idea about spelling out numbers lower than 13, it doesn't look like a hard rule or something that needs to be enforced.
That's on the pretentious end of the curve. The practice is increasingly less common and has always been inconsistent. I've seen anywhere from nine to 13 as the cut-off. My middle school English teach was not a woman to be trifled with, and she said 13.
About the comma: again I haven't encountered a hard rule around this.
This one is actually hard & fast. When you have two complete sentences joined with a conjunction, you use a comma(*). There's no comma unless you
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Thank you for these, duly noted.
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Someone mentioned that my writing was "pretentious" and that I was showing off.
Feel honored. They broke out the big dictionary so you would understand their criticism.
They could have just called you a "show off".
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They might have, I was paraphrasing them :)
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You must be one of them colleagues, how are you man? :)
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Math is intensely important in technical areas. Quick estimates across variables keeping the result to an order of magnitude is invaluable in a quick meeting to decide if further analysis makes sense. Spelling is also important. For all intensive purposes, in ten cities are fun examples that will pass a spell check and expose one as ignorant.
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That is the point he was making.
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> It makes as little sense as teaching math,
In England, Scotland and other Commonwealth countries they teach maths
Mathematics is plural, you know.
Local dialects (Score:2)
In England, Scotland and other Commonwealth countries they teach maths
Oh you and your crazy idioms.
Mathematics is plural, you know.
So is economics but nobody shortens that to "econs". If you want to say "maths" instead of "math" go ahead. I promise I won't care. But let's not pretend any particular dialect of english is somehow self consistent or makes much sense.
And mathematics is a subject which by definition is singular. The word "mathematics" is both the singular and plural form. You can refer to the subject (singular) as well as the multiple parts of the subject (plural) with the same word. Same
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Mathematics is plural, you know.
Is it, though? Is "mathematic" ever used as a singular noun? The etymology of the -ics suffix is pretty interesting, and it doesn't look like there's really a correct answer.
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They can have it for free.
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I think Microsoft Plus only came with 1.0. IE4 was bundled with Windows 98, while version 2 and 3 were with later releases of Windows 95.
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wouldn't be too hard to detect affected browsers and deny the test .. or disable it with some clever js or images or whatnot.
Better yet - give wrong answers. If a kid is cheating on most of the questions, it will be apparent by the pattern of wrong answers selected.
Misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yup. Thinking the same thing. The solution is obviously to reverse roles and let the teachers & implementation learn something from the kids. It may take a few years thou.
Hopefully the collective laughing of the internet will instill the idiots to do some basic QA before releasing. But most likely they will run back to pencil, paper, and scantrons or hire even more expensive consultants to check a QA box but not actually do it.
Not news for nerds... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nor is this stuff that matters.
Embarrassing and silly, but upon reading the summary, understandable how it happened. Not worth wasting screen space for.
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Actually it's a good lesson that browser based isn't always the best option. Unless you lock down which browser and which version (good luck with that).
Keeping up with Angular exposes browser compatibility issues, it's like the late 1990s again...
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Nor is this stuff that matters.
I'm the OP, and I totally disagree with you. There are stories [slashdot.org] about bugs [slashdot.org] and misconfigured computers [slashdot.org] all of the time here on Slashdot. This is a story about a large IT infrastructure being beaten by script kiddies [slashdot.org] (literally kiddies). This is what Slashdot is all about.
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If the editors don't get any feedback, they won't be able to improve.
I'd give them an A (Score:2)
For computer literacy.
Or whatever counts as a high mark in UK schools. They don't use ABCDF, or do they?
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No, they use QWERTY.
It's France that uses AZERTY.
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>It's France that uses AZERTY.
I thought that was Germany
But in Britain they do use French letters.
In France, not so much (more of them are Catholic.)
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Simply put... (Score:3)
Glitch? (Score:2)
I think feature would be more appropriate...
Impossible to solve? (Score:3)
If only there were a way to put the test questions on a medium that did not provide automatic access to spell checking, internet etc.
Darn, I would gladly kill a tree for such a solution.
Useful (Score:2)
Sure, disable spell checkers... because in real life they don't exist either,
Sure, it's fine to be able to remember everything but it's only a few who can do it close to perfectly. The rest just need to be able to know how to proof your writing afterwards. It's completely similar to proficiency tests when hiring new people for IT jobs like operations. Sure, it's fine to know exactly what every error means and how to fix them, but it's just as good to know your limits and how to use Google for the rest. What
Math teacher used to say (Score:2)
Poison the well (Score:2)
The solution is obvious- save all of the misspelled words in the spell checker dictionary so they all show as correct. Vindictive version- only save one or two misspelled words and remove the correct spelling. They could also set another language as default, or better yet remove the dictionary or use a program without a spell checker.
Beause of all the auto-spellchecking now (Score:2)
I see (Score:2)
After fixing all the glitches, the students will have to copy-paste the text to a spellchecker-enabled window.
Then they will disable copying.
The students will then take a screenshot and OCR it into a spellchecker window.
Then ...
Scottish (Score:2)
Who cares how they spell things, they're going to mispronounce the words anyway.
Re:Why is spelling still a thing? (Score:5, Informative)
0) Not all written communication is mediated by electronic equipment
1) Spelling checkers do not include the full lexicon
2) The lexicon changes
3) Different dialects have different spellings, and while you may wish the enforce one dialect's spelling in your prose, any quotations should match that of the source material
etc. etc.
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You know that spellcheckers have different dictionaries for different dialects, right? So, for example, these computers would probably have been configured for "British English".
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They often don't tell you witch word to use. Their great, but not the entire solution.
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FTFY
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Your spell checker is working well. You were thinking of... wait for it... "They're"
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"Their" bothered you but "witch" didn't?
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1) Spelling checkers do not include the full lexicon
Some of the omissions in spell check dictionaries are glaring, especially when it comes to science or engineering terms. And I'm not talking about some crazy obscure biology terms, but even things like "electromagnetism".
Re:Why is spelling still a thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
When everyone finally gets there, they're, and their; and it's and its, correct; then, and only then, will I agree with you.
And you know what, "long division" was already ancient when I learned it, over 50 years ago. In the grand scheme of things, 50 more years is nothing, and if it's irrelevant now, it was just as irrelevant then. Call me a dinosaur if you want, but if we take away your calculator I bet I can run rings around you at math.
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Call me a dinosaur if you want, but if we take away your calculator I bet I can run rings around you at math.
You are not a dinosaur, you simply had a proper education.
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When everyone finally gets there, they're, and their; and it's and its, correct; then, and only then, will I agree with you.
Uh, those are grammar errors, not spelling.
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if we take away your calculator I bet I can run rings around you at math
And if we take away their jackhammers, I bet John Henry [wikipedia.org] can bang holes in rock faster than any modern construction worker.
But in all seriousness, English isn't about being able to spell any more than mathematics is about arithmetic. There are higher level skills that we should be striving towards, and so if you want to make an argument that long division is useful (which it very well may be) you should be claiming that understanding it allows one to more easily absorb next-level topics (like calculus or lin
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Call me a dinosaur if you want, but if we take away your calculator I bet I can run rings around you at math.
What calculator? Programming is my day job so I'll just use python or octave from an xterm if I need one. I mean sure you could probably run rings around me at doing arithmetic on paper if you take away my computer, but honestly what's the point?
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spell checkers are to built into every single typing device
I also believe grammar is to useless.
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The students who can study to some standard from students who cant, won't.
The students who have had the support needed to learn to spell.
Such students will do well at university when given other new subjects to study.
Students who can learn to spell might do well with other languages, science, math, arts.
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Your spell checker is working well. You were thinking of... wait for it... "can't".
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Why is spelling still a thing?
Oy dunt no
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I'll be slightly more polite about it, but you are correct.
Literacy in 2018 is the ability to use the tools that you have available to accomplish the task. And for kids today, a spellchecker is an available tool, and there is no reason to disable it, nor is it in any stretch of the imagination cheating to use it.
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It's not a common situation. I honestly can't recall the last time I had to hand write anything more involved than a medical intake form, and the most complicated thing there is how to spell your own name and the street you live on.
So no, it's not really a "good communication skill" when virtually every bit of writing one does involves interacting with a computer, not a piece of paper and a pen.
And I say that it's not that valuable as someone who is actually good at spelling, someone who used to get fairly
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Then the test is pointless and needs to be ended.
There are far more important things to spend limited education time on than rote memorization of spelling.
Re: Notepad (Score:4, Insightful)
Some clearly can't.
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English spellings are complex because English, like America, is a melting pot.
English isn't French. That's an important distinction, because while France has the Académie Français, English has nothing of the sort, and accepts words from the entire world.
And simplifications are happening. For example, fast food isn't purchased at a drive-through, it's purchased at a drive-thru.
And then there's the example of the constant penis debate. Is it pluralized as penii, or penises? It's penises, of cour
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I'm impressed there is a scottish English dictionary at all...:
Ha! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie? Your impudence protects you sairly; I canna say but ye strunt rarely, Owre gauze and lace; Tho', faith! I fear ye dine but sparely On sic a place.
Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner, Detested, shunn'd by saunt an' sinner, How daur ye set your fit upon her- Sae fine a lady? Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner On some poor body
Swith! in some beggar's haffet squattle; There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle, Wi' ither kindred, jumping cattle, In shoals and nations; Whaur horn nor bane ne'er daur unsettle Your thick plantations.
Re: spelling in English (Score:2)
There is no such thing as Scottish English - we generally just speak English with a liberal smattering of Scots.
Your poem is in Scots, which is related to English in the same way Spanish is related to Italian, eg it's not a dialect of English but an equally old language from common roots.
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Much of the Scots vocabulary is actually Scandinavian, not a mutation of English as many wrongly assume.
Words such as Kirk, Neb, Greetin, Kist, Flit, Moose, Hoose, Byre, Nicht, Bairn, Braw etc are all either found, or have close approximations, in modern Icelandic, Danish, Swedish etc.
The word "Braw" is used in Sweden & Scotland today. Fife would be a good place to hear it in daily conversation.
The Scottish East coast being more nordic in linguistics.
You only have to read classic Scottish literature, ta
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English spellings are complex because English, like America, is a melting pot.
English isn't French. That's an important distinction, because while France has the Académie Français, English has nothing of the sort, and accepts words from the entire world.
And simplifications are happening. For example, fast food isn't purchased at a drive-through, it's purchased at a drive-thru.
And then there's the example of the constant penis debate. Is it pluralized as penii, or penises? It's penises, of course, but some people like to go back to the word origin, which sometimes leads to bizarre results.
Tell that to a Quebecois, or an Acadian, or people in other french speaking areas of the world. The point is that French is just as complex and has it's own dialects. The Acadamie Francais sounds good until you realize that it's just as effective as Webster's dictionary....
Re: Of course they were cheating (Score:2)
You must be English