Telegraph.co.uk's top 10 most annoying Americanisms - we can do better.

Crazyjeeper said:
The force you are referring to is actually called centripetal force.
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Thank you!

although...now that I read it again, it doesn't say "force"...could just be describing it's motion...
 
I really don't see the problem with the cricket thing, you know it is a game held in a stadium, why do you need to say the whole lot every time?
 
CraigB said:
Why is it Brits turn a word that ends in an a, to a word that ends in er? Today I heard someone with a British accent on NPR say Rwander instead of Rwanda...
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It happens when an a at the end of any word is followed by another vowel...the main being an a followed by the word "is"

In Moto GP Commentary if they ever talk about Carlos Checa they will say "Carlos Checker is headed to the front!"

My ex girlfriend from Liverpool would do it a lot with Ribena...

"Ribenar is great!"

Just something they do to ease the flow from an a to the next vowel so they don't have to pause in between. It's weird yes I know but...well...british.
 
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Cobol74 said:
You are American, do not ever try to understand Cricket - you will fail.
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pfft... From dating an English girl and an Australian girl for a combined 3 years I can say I've watched a fair amount of Cricket compared to the average Yank. I may not fully understand it but it is much easier to understand than baseball or american football. There just aren't as many different situations happening in Cricket as there are in baseball. And nowhere near as many as football.

Sure you can say that baseball is a horrible perversion of cricket or whatever you will being a proper pommie but... When it comes down to it the game of baseball is more complex than the game of cricket.

So maybe I should be the one saying you would never understand our American sports :p

Though...I find cricket terribly boring anyways. Something for aristocrats to sit around drinking tea with one another and making business deals.

*pop*
 
In classical mechanics, centrifugal force is an outward force associated with rotation. Centrifugal force is one of several so-called pseudo-forces (also known as inertial forces), so named because, unlike real forces, they do not originate in interactions with other bodies situated in the environment of the particle upon which they act. Instead, centrifugal force originates in the rotation of the frame of reference within which observations are made.
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The centripetal force is the external force required to make a body follow a curved path. Hence centripetal force is a kinematic force requirement, not a particular kind of force like gravity or electromagnetism. Isaac Newton's description is found in the Principia.
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motogpboy said:
Though...I find cricket terribly boring anyways. Something for aristocrats to sit around drinking tea with one another and making business deals.

*pop*
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maybe if you are in the members stand. they tried to ban the mexican wave at the scg because people were throwing all kinds of things as the crowd went up. including bottles filled with piss. :lol:
 
Dav said:
maybe if you are in the members stand. they tried to ban the mexican wave at the scg because people were throwing all kinds of things as the crowd went up. including bottles filled with piss. :lol:
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Haha my mistake mate... I was thinking of Lords when I wrote that ;)

But hey at least you can relate... the aussies and the americans together said f it to the pomp and circumstance of the british :p

You just haven't gone the extra step and taken the queen off your money :lol:
 
About the cricket:

We all know some sort of local saying that just sounds horribly wrong, but that is how our languages are defined and developed. In german, i'd say something like "i'll go onto the race track", even if i'll just be standing by the side of it. The correct form would be "to" - which is used in lots of other circumstances, but it's considered a correct expression nonetheless.

Similarly, you could say "i'm going to hospital", but "i'm going to the shop", even though there is no shop specified.

just hypothesising, i'm certainly no expert in languages.

Something else i've just thought of, allthough it's not entirely on topic, is borrowing phrases:
We germans have a bad habit of doing it, and sometimes we mess them up completely. This is what we call Denglisch (deutsch & englis[c]h)

here are a few exaples that might entertain you:

"Handy" is the correct german word for mobile phone, or cellphone. The technical term is something along the lines of mobile telephone, but it's a widely used as maybe the term light commercial vehicle is used in british english. The term originates from some product name from Motorola (i think), and it's redicolous.

"Beamer", means a modern video projector. The correct german term is Projektor, so there wasn't any need in the first place to create a new term, i suspect it was created to distinguish expensive modern video projectos from the old style overhead slide projectors, but it's slipped into modern german.

"Center" means centre, or "Zentrum" in german. We're just trying to appear conteporary and modern, without reason or wit. It's used in terms such as "city center" or sometimes, even "citi", which i blindly suspect comes from the bank company's name, which was established as a brand before a majority of germans had a grasp of english.

And some quick one's because my coffee is getting colder as we speak:

Jobben (literally to job), to excercise a short term job.
Mobbing (bullying) don't ask me where that came from.
Oldtimer (vintage or classic car) again, english word(s) with german spelling and grammar applied to them.
Papers or Papes (rolling paper for cigarettes) wicked :>
Public Viewing (watching sports on a big screen in public) this one is quite new, it was only established at the time of the fifa world cup in germany
Shooting (photo shoot), but if you're a photographer and wanted to appear fancy and cool, you'd use the correct term, which in turn would make you appear snobbish. I love this term, because if you're a photographer with limited english in england, you may get into some quite funny situations, or bad ones.
Smoking (a dinner suit, a tuxedo) if anybody could explain this one?

And if all else fails, you can always muck up a sentence with english spelling and grammar. It begins with rather small errors such as putting an apostrophe before an s where none belongs in neither english nor german, as in "Handy's". And it extends all the way to this:

"Mit Jamba! k?nnen Sie Klingelt?ne, Logos und Spiele direkt aufs Handy downloaden. W?hlen Sie aus Tausenden coolen Sounds, aktuellen Games und hippen Logos."

Here's an attempted translation:
"With Jamba!, you can download ring tones, logos (meaning pictures) and games directly to your mobile telephone. Choose from thousands of different Sounds (meaning sound bites), topical games (topical meaning new and fresh, it doesn't make sense in german either) and hip logos."

to download becomes "Downloaden",mobile phone becomes "Handy", hip becomes hippen, a conjugation of hip, "Spiele" (the german word for Games as in board game) suddenly, after being correct in the first sentence, becomes "Games". So in conclusion, especially in marketing and media, german gets cluttered with pieces of english, being used wrongly, irrelevantly and pointlessy, and we've all become used to it. It's of course not the englishmen's fault, but ours, since we seem to have convinced the people who do this kind of thing, that we're all imbeciles, or it could be because they're imbeciles.

sorry for ranting on for so long, but it really pisses me off, properly. Turns out it's tough times if you care about language.
 
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Stefano1337 said:
Papers or Papes (rolling paper for cigarettes) wicked :>
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Haha I do hope i'm not terribly out of line here but I feel that Jeremy Clarkson would like this joke and this being part of a top gear forum well..here goes..

Upon seeing a German talking/asking about "papers" I actually spit up the beer I was drinking. :D Hehe all in good fun!

But yeah going back to the full post that is pretty interesting that you guys are combining english terms into your everyday usage. Us Americans do a bit of that as well with foreign languages, especially French.
 
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I've just noticed something:
The front page says "Top Gear is currently on break and will be back in March reportedly.", is that correct? Shouldn't it say "Top Gear is currently on break and will reportedly be back in March"? It looks to me like the word reportedly in the above case refers to how 'top gear' will be once it has come back, and in the case below, how it is that top gear is coming back in march.
 
NecroJoe said:
That one is moot because there is no such thing as centrifugal "force."
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centrifugal_force.png
 
I have a new most annoying Britishism that I would be much obliged to share with the rest of you.

"YAY LEWIS HAMILTON!!!"

Or any iteration containing that name.
 
oh man lewis bloody hamilton. i like getting the english commentary for the f1 but that is the worst part about it, they romance explosion every time it looks like he might possibly have a chance of an overtake. i guess it would be the same for australian commentators if mark webber would win a race, or even finish a few :lol:
 
Dav said:
oh man lewis bloody hamilton. i like getting the english commentary for the f1 but that is the worst part about it, they romance explosion every time it looks like he might possibly have a chance of an overtake. i guess it would be the same for australian commentators if mark webber would win a race, or even finish a few :lol:
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Lol...

Well hey mate...at least you don't live in the US and have to listen to Peter Hamilton commentating all the freaking time!
 
motogpboy said:
I have a new most annoying Britishism that I would be much obliged to share with the rest of you.

"YAY LEWIS HAMILTON!!!"

Or any iteration containing that name.
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:lol:

Get out...

edit: Has this guy only ever posted in one thread?
 
the worst bit was i watched most of the last season in london so after listening to james allen and martin brundle go on and on about him for and hour and a freaking half, then for the next day you hear it on all the news reports, and see him and his dad on the front page of everything.

freeview is awesome over there though, wish we had free tv as good as that here.
 
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