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Speak American, please. I don’t understand this word.
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Don’t worry. I speak “international” when necessary.
What he means is “colo(u)r”,
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I did of course mean “internal manifestation of the reaction of electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths 380-740nm with the retina”.
Sorry for any confusion.
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I’m not sure we need to be so philosophical about it, but it certainly does make it quite clear as to the meaning that way without involving different languages (British English versus American English).
ETA: Upon further reflection, I think @sanstitre_has_left_the_building’s definition of “colour” is not adequate, because was referring to the orange itself having colour. And since the orange is not actually within the eye nor near the retina, it is difficult to claim that the orange is a “colour”. So, when talking about “colour” of an object, I’m not sure we’re actually talking about the internal manifestation, but rather, the wavelengths that the orange reflects which are then internally manifested within the retina.
I present to you counter evidence, exhibit A: “herb”. The “h” is silent, and has always been silent until much more recently, when the BRITISH decided to change it and start pronouncing the “h”. This, of course, means the Brits like to use a phonetic spelling, dropping any historical etymology. American English, however, tends to favor spelling things however we well please…which makes us much more self-motivated and independently minded. If you want to call that “wrong”, so be it. But we might end up in a war over it.
(Oh, wait. We did. And we won.)
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Fixed that for you.
Sorry. For ya.
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Fixed it for you
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Haha. Do you really want to go there?
The UK is in many ways substantially freer than the US. We may be a monarchy, but our Queen is respected the world over. And has almost zero power.
The US has been led by surprisingly few families in my lifetime. And we’ve never seen nepotism in political offices with real power in the UK.
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I should add to this that had the Brits decided to spell things differently, the outcome of the Revolutionary War might have been entirely different. I’m not sure how, exactly. That’s why I used the words “might have”.
One of the things I most remember from my time living in the US is how weirdly proud you are of the Revolutionary War. Over here — and I say this entirely matter of factly — we simply don’t care. I think we’re more ashamed by Mary I’s loss of Calais.
One of things I like about being British is that we are a sublimely confident nation. Americans fly their flag everywhere, which betrays an insecurity to our eye. We know we are the greatest country in the world. We don’t need to fly banners to remind us of the fact or let other people know. We don’t need to make our children recite a pledge of allegiance every day in school.
America is a thrilling, vital, diverse, beautiful, inspiring country. I fell in love with it over forty years ago and my love is indiminished. I’ve travelled the country widely and frequently.
It’s never really felt at ease with itself. With our thousand years of history we are.
Well, we were. Don’t mention Brexit.
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Of course we are. It was the war that led to the birth of our nation.
Of course not. It is just another loss of territory in a long history of the British Empire losing territory.
Not a single British person would rise to that bait. We just don’t care.
We might have lost territory. But we haven’t lost status. We have one of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Our language is spoken across the world. We have Shakespeare and Newton.
Yeah, yeah. Brexit. We might be on the slide. If you want to wind me up, go for that. Revolutionary War and loss of Empire is a wind-up dead end.
It wasn’t really bait. Just a fact illustrating the point that every nation has the things they care about and don’t care about. America likes England. They are our friends. But do most of us care about the things Britons care about? Nope. In the same way, Britons don’t care about the same things Americans do.
The fact that you don’t care about the Revolutionary War doesn’t change the level of importance it is to Americans!
I liken it to when my kids come to me and exclaim to me some new factoid they learned, or something they accomplished. To me, personally? Old news. Who cares. But to my child, it is HUGE.
American is but a baby compared to England in terms of history. But we have our moments to celebrate…and we celebrate them proudly!
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Haha. No. He’s an idiot.
I’m British. But I also consider myself European. I think the EU is flawed, but brilliant. Leaving it is a catastrophic mistake.
You started it! The wind up, I mean. Not the war. Well, you started that, too.
A lot of you seem to love our monarchy. Almost more than we do.
I can’t believe I forgot to say this: Vietnam.
#mike drop
The Vietnam War had a strong influence on our country. Mixture of shame, pride, lessons learned, etc. The very way we fight wars and defend nations changed due to Vietnam. Vietnam veterans, today, command a huge level of respect due to their bravery in an impossible situation. My father-in-law among them.
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I feel like I heard about it on a podcast one time. Wasn’t it one of those fancy powdered wigs? Turned into a phrase for fancy things or people, and ended up getting attached to many other articles, like penguins. I’d look it up, but it I’m too lazy.
I’ll still always think of it as cheesy noodles. Makes the song funnier.
I mention Vietnam, not as the punchline to a joke (in the way I think you did when you mentioned the Revolutionary War) but to make the point that America is not as great as it often seems to think it is. Vietnam taught the world that America cannot do anything it wants.
The current US president has been tweeting warnings to Iran. I wonder how seriously Iran will take them. North Korea was issued similar warnings, yet its leader has continued with its missile testing programme.
Why? Because the only sense in which America is the greatest power in the world is in its ability literally to destroy the world. And it’s not even unique in that ability. Trump could nuke Iran — assuming the military would actually carry out his orders — but that would lead to a global catastrophe that would end well for no-one. Short of that option, exactly what could the US military achieve in a campaign against Iran? The world, led by the US, has seemed impotent in Syria. Was the Iraq war won? It’s too early to tell.
As I said, and I think it’s worth repeating because I feel sure that silent, invisibly twitchy fingers are soon to be at work:
I may well have travelled more widely across the US than many of its citizens on these forums. Each trip was wonderful — and that’s before I discovered and became obsessed with Walt Disney World.
For the record:
Yellow dot = been there
Big yellow dot = been there lots of times (Orlando’s needs upgrading)
Red dot = lived there
(Now that I’m looking at it, I realise there are dots missing. It needs updating.)