Miss Anthropy
School of Applied Knowledge
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Posted - 2007.07.30 13:36:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Fink Angel
How does that quote go? "England and America are two countries seperated by a common language." 
There is one American term I hear on TV that sounds really odd to my English ears, with a word dropped, and that is when someone says "Write me" or "Write me back".
Lol, this gets on my nerves. And sayings like "my bad"; this makes no grammatical sense.
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Miss Anthropy
School of Applied Knowledge
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Posted - 2007.07.30 14:43:00 -
[2]
Originally by: Gojyu
Originally by: Miss Anthropy
Originally by: Fink Angel
How does that quote go? "England and America are two countries seperated by a common language."
There is one American term I hear on TV that sounds really odd to my English ears, with a word dropped, and that is when someone says "Write me" or "Write me back".
Lol, this gets on my nerves. And sayings like "my bad"; this makes no grammatical sense.
Is it? also irks me from the other side of the equation
Think about it for a second. "My bad" on it's own is a grammatically incomplete phrase that contains no intrinsic meaning. It needs a following word to complete it, such as "My bad armpits" or "My bad grammar". Either that or it should be changed to "I'm bad".
Another one that gets on my nerves is "alright already". Alright is technically a misspelling of "all right", which means "everything is right". Alright already is used in US slang to counter an argument; i.e., if someone is moaning at another person to do something, the other person might respond with "alright already". Basically, in saying this, they mean, "OK, I'm on my way", or "Calm down", or some other placatory remark.
I'm not saying the Americans have bad English. Well, actually I am kind of. On the one hand they spell things differently (and better to be honest as we Brits refuse to embrace phonetics) like armor, humor, etc. But on the other hand the Americans have a bizarre phraseology like the above I mentioned. It's a form of incomplete slang; as if they couldn't be bothered to think up the rest of a remark.
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