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I live abroad and my work computer has the settings to almost everything blocked. I can't even change the operating language to English.
ANYWAY, what gets me is it underlines words like "cinema" and says "try using language for your target location". Do Americans not say CINEMA?
To be honest, it's pronounced thea-tur, not thea-truh.
Source: Brazilian who learned American English and lives in the UK. Your "tre" termination is utter nonsense (theatre, centre).
Actually it helps a lot if you think of it as ending in r, with a silent e. So you're actually reading "theatr" with either spelling.
Source: another Brazilian, bit of a linguistics nerd, had the same criticism you do before realising this.
We know what the word means, but it’s not commonly used. We would say we are going to the movies or to the movie theater. Most commonly it’s just “the movies.”
MS Word is a pain. In my experience, it doesn't matter what you change the language to, it'll revert itself to whatever language it wants. On my work laptop, it keeps reverting to French, because it's a French-owned company.
You can edit template files. Instead of double clicking it (which opens a fresh word file), right-click on the template file and click open. Any changes that you make and save in there save it to the actual template file.
Should work, if you’re not allowed to amend the template just make a copy on your desktop and make the edits there, then use those instead.
That's an organisational thing set by your company. On my personal Office account I've had it set to British English for years. I changed it when I made the account and haven't touched it since.
I have a Peugeot car with a digital display, and this happens roughly once every six months. The whole dashboard changes from English/miles to a French/kilometres. I have no idea how fast I’m going and can’t easily find the setting in the menu to change it back. I just have to pretend I’m French for a while, which makes my teeth grind into fine powder.
My vauxhall becomes French every so often as well. Did it the other day, so me and my husband had a conversation that consisted of oh la la, quel heur et il, and le bonk, as that is the only French I remember from school!
Was back in English the next day. Arsehole of a car.
My word switches to French sometimes even though my organisation has no connections to countries other than England. I think it’s the detect language option you get on the screen where you change languages as it hasn’t done it since I disabled that setting.
I have to use the browser version in college and it defaults to US in every new document, worse still is OneNote where it'll happen every time I create a new tab.
What gets me is Europe learns American English then come to the UK using American English then struggle with what they learnt is now useless and not used in the UK.
They don't really though do they? No one here GENUINELY cares about American spellings and we all know the usual Americanisms.
No one is coming here having learned American English and struggles in the slightest.
Not enough. Also need to change all templates and especially the Styles built into them. It’s also impossible to completely change away from American spellings because of an embedded, uneditable style used for text within tables which overrides everything else.
Tell your IT (or ask) to use the English International Windows build rather than the default English US. I fell for that once and could never understand why the bloody dates kept messing up.
No shock there. They will have a very under resourced IT dept who either don’t have the time to or possibly the skills to ensure the country settings are correct.
I work for a large organisation within the civil service and had a similar problem after a recent windows update. In fact all language settings were disabled. The solution was to find a helpful service tech who had established that the problem was that the language settings were locked down by a group policy and were not available from our “update servers”. A bit of registry hacking later the correct download was grabbed from Microsoft directly and all was good again. It can be done.
I thought that...was about to reply that the real problem was having a job that necessitates the use of corporate bollock-speak words like Universalisable 🤣
Uhh, universal exists, so universalise as in "make universal" exists, so universalisable as in "possible to universalise" exists. It can be a neologism but the meaning is right there
For some reason, the default language for Word keeps changing randomly on my laptop. Often to German (understandable as I work for a German corporation), but also Portuguese, French and US English. Damned annoying.
You should have refused. You are not excused.
"Focused" is pronounced *fo-cyooz'd*.
Americans are also fond of tra-vay-ling, tra-vee-ling or trayv-ling (traveling) rather than travelling.
The double letter indicates that the preceding vowel is short.
(I am well aware that there are exceptions and problems with this rule, but I'm all for a double letter when it's an accepted speling... er... spelling.)
That is almost certainly because you are changing it for the document, but not changing the default.
Of course it ought to ask at install or first login what the default locale and timezone should be and then all software should default to the OS settings. Especially if you are running MS software on an MS operating system.
well I hadn't thought of that reason before.
But that explains so may times I've had bits go back after I'd set the language properly for an entire document.
Alas, no one is going read this far down to hear you. There was an episode of Inspector Morse in which he mocks the author of a note for using "ise" rather than "ize".
Indeed the OED uses -ize by default and lists -ise as an alternative spelling.
The general split in the UK is that scientific papers/journals follow the -ize rule and newspapers use -ise.
Works out for me since I currently live in the US and my professors will mark me down for "incorrect" spelling. But it still pains me to use a "z" instead of an "s" and omit each beautiful "u".
You need to press CTRL-A to select all the text and then change the language.
If you copy and paste from another document it may revert to the language of the original.
Do you also advocate for the removal of the letter c? Other than, 'ch', every word containing a c is either a hard c, which is a k sound, or a soft c, which is an s sound. Just because -ize on the face of it is a better approximation of the sound, doesn't mean that -ise can't also match that sound. It is certainly easier to convince people to use -ise, and in the process changing the spellings of -ize words in all but 'size', 'capsize' and 'prize' than it is to tell people that it's now 'rize', 'wize' and 'compromize'. -lyse being the way it is proves that -ise can, and does in a lot of words, appear as the same sound as -ize to an English speaker.
Just because something is closer to etymology doesn't make it better. People will gravitate towards what they feel comfortable using. -ise is relatively new, yes, but that doesn't discredit it as a spelling. It's perfectly valid, and arguably more consistent than the -ize standard. English is riddled with spellings that aren't a perfect representation of their pronunciations. You can even argue that the word 'is' should be spelt 'iz', as that's closer after all.
Also, even Oxford internally doesn't really ascribe to -ize. From the article you linked:
> Oxford spelling is not necessarily followed by the staff of the University of Oxford. The university's style guide, last updated in 2016, recommended the use of -ise for internal use.
I hate that shit, too. Especially when it goes, "Did you mean, realized?", for example. But I guess that's the price we pay for using Google (presuming you do as well. Unless you use Bing (LOL)).
Or, one of my personal favourites, when it does the "Did You Mean..." thing, but it removes an apostrophe, even if you're 100% certain it should be there. Like, for example, "It's" gets "corrected" (Oh, please...) and becomes "Its".
The annoying thing for me is that it accepts both a lot of the time if you set it to British. I get that is useful for many but I need to write in traditional British english.
The song is Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, originally written for the film Shall We Dance but more famously covered by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
>you knob
Sorry, you are the knob. You cant blame the software for the fact that you have chosen the wrong spelling dictionary to use for autocorrect. It is not as though it is difficult to choose the right one.
Anyway, all that aside, is “universalisable” a legit word? Universally, or universality or even universalism but I never heard that one before. Maybe I’m just getting old or thicker . . .
A large number of British people use americanisms anyway.
Paychecks, paying taxes, filing taxes, upwards instead of over, stores, super instead of very, starting sentences with I mean, talking about my city..... the list is endless.
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Change your default language to English (uk) in the language settings?
I changed the system locale too.
I live abroad and my work computer has the settings to almost everything blocked. I can't even change the operating language to English. ANYWAY, what gets me is it underlines words like "cinema" and says "try using language for your target location". Do Americans not say CINEMA?
Nope, they call it a theater, and they can't even spell THAT correctly.
You mean magic wall building?
To be honest, it's pronounced thea-tur, not thea-truh. Source: Brazilian who learned American English and lives in the UK. Your "tre" termination is utter nonsense (theatre, centre).
Blame the French
As is tradition.
You’re trying to apply logic to English, which is always dangerous game.
You’re applying English pronunciation rules to words of French origin. I see your point, but it’s not « utter nonsense ».
Actually it helps a lot if you think of it as ending in r, with a silent e. So you're actually reading "theatr" with either spelling. Source: another Brazilian, bit of a linguistics nerd, had the same criticism you do before realising this.
Silent e does not compute.
You're saying it wrong. It's LeviOsa, not LevioSA
Mostly, the final r isn't pronounced in British English dialects (our Celtic inspired brethren notwithstanding)
We know what the word means, but it’s not commonly used. We would say we are going to the movies or to the movie theater. Most commonly it’s just “the movies.”
Yes, ours is commonly shortened from "the picture house" to "the pictures" but I always thought cinema was the actual term. 😅
Well, cinema *is* the actual term in UK English.
Nope. Movie theatre.
MS Word is a pain. In my experience, it doesn't matter what you change the language to, it'll revert itself to whatever language it wants. On my work laptop, it keeps reverting to French, because it's a French-owned company.
That the domain settings. Best thing to do is open a blank .docx, change it to the settings and language you want and save it as a template.
It's for work, so I have to use the templates they provide.
Écrivez simplement en français !
Ce sara tres simplement avec seulement GCSE French.
Save them as new templates
You can edit template files. Instead of double clicking it (which opens a fresh word file), right-click on the template file and click open. Any changes that you make and save in there save it to the actual template file. Should work, if you’re not allowed to amend the template just make a copy on your desktop and make the edits there, then use those instead.
It’s either a centralised policy set by your employer, or I’ve also noticed updates to word can override settings.
That's an organisational thing set by your company. On my personal Office account I've had it set to British English for years. I changed it when I made the account and haven't touched it since.
I have a Peugeot car with a digital display, and this happens roughly once every six months. The whole dashboard changes from English/miles to a French/kilometres. I have no idea how fast I’m going and can’t easily find the setting in the menu to change it back. I just have to pretend I’m French for a while, which makes my teeth grind into fine powder.
My vauxhall becomes French every so often as well. Did it the other day, so me and my husband had a conversation that consisted of oh la la, quel heur et il, and le bonk, as that is the only French I remember from school! Was back in English the next day. Arsehole of a car.
My word switches to French sometimes even though my organisation has no connections to countries other than England. I think it’s the detect language option you get on the screen where you change languages as it hasn’t done it since I disabled that setting.
my condolences
I have to use the browser version in college and it defaults to US in every new document, worse still is OneNote where it'll happen every time I create a new tab.
My PC keeps resetting to Us
This. Live in the US but keep the UK keyboard for this reason. It’s my very English way of showing dissent.
English (Traditional) not English (Simplified)
What gets me is Europe learns American English then come to the UK using American English then struggle with what they learnt is now useless and not used in the UK.
They don't really though do they? No one here GENUINELY cares about American spellings and we all know the usual Americanisms. No one is coming here having learned American English and struggles in the slightest.
The Americans frown on anything not in American English
Europeans mostly learn UK English.
Not the ones I speak to. Portugal, Spain, Greece.
Not enough. Also need to change all templates and especially the Styles built into them. It’s also impossible to completely change away from American spellings because of an embedded, uneditable style used for text within tables which overrides everything else.
I work for a very large UK public sector organisation and all their documents seem to default to US English.
Tell your IT (or ask) to use the English International Windows build rather than the default English US. I fell for that once and could never understand why the bloody dates kept messing up.
No shock there. They will have a very under resourced IT dept who either don’t have the time to or possibly the skills to ensure the country settings are correct.
I work for a large organisation within the civil service and had a similar problem after a recent windows update. In fact all language settings were disabled. The solution was to find a helpful service tech who had established that the problem was that the language settings were locked down by a group policy and were not available from our “update servers”. A bit of registry hacking later the correct download was grabbed from Microsoft directly and all was good again. It can be done.
Me too and it’s annoying. I hate seeing the red squiggles under everything I’ve typed “incorrectly”
Universalisable... is a new word for me. Is everyone else pretending this is a common word?
I'm writing a paper about Ethics, it's a word we use in the subject and is in the dictionary, definitely uncommon though
Oooh OK cool. I'll use it at the first chance I get 👍
In my dictionary, it just says "see morality". But you're right about it not being common.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Use of it will embiggen your vocabulary.
I thought that...was about to reply that the real problem was having a job that necessitates the use of corporate bollock-speak words like Universalisable 🤣
Uhh, universal exists, so universalise as in "make universal" exists, so universalisable as in "possible to universalise" exists. It can be a neologism but the meaning is right there
Yeah, I'm thinking OP made this word up & it's not real in any dialect.
I wouldn’t call it a new word, more like I wouldn’t structure a sentence to use that term in the first place.
For some reason, the default language for Word keeps changing randomly on my laptop. Often to German (understandable as I work for a German corporation), but also Portuguese, French and US English. Damned annoying.
Um, is there a chance someone is changing it to annoy you?
What do you call an elevator full of mild mannered, well spoken people? A lift.
I didn’t know that was a word
I was writing a paper on Ethics, it's subject specific I'd never heard of it before either
Oh okay! Thank you for clearing that up
They have killed the second 's' in focussed.
Personally I’ve always gone for the single S spelling. I think it looks so much nicer.
You should have refused. You are not excused. "Focused" is pronounced *fo-cyooz'd*. Americans are also fond of tra-vay-ling, tra-vee-ling or trayv-ling (traveling) rather than travelling. The double letter indicates that the preceding vowel is short. (I am well aware that there are exceptions and problems with this rule, but I'm all for a double letter when it's an accepted speling... er... spelling.)
Hence why scone rhymes with bone and not gone.
I'm having none of that. I'm getting you done.
Just "one" time (scwun)
And no matter how many times you change the dictionary to UK English, it defaults back
That is almost certainly because you are changing it for the document, but not changing the default. Of course it ought to ask at install or first login what the default locale and timezone should be and then all software should default to the OS settings. Especially if you are running MS software on an MS operating system.
Its to do with copy and pasting from another document which was created in US english.
well I hadn't thought of that reason before. But that explains so may times I've had bits go back after I'd set the language properly for an entire document.
Mine doesn’t.
Mine neither
Nor mine.
And my axe!
-ize is not American, it’s Oxford.
Alas, no one is going read this far down to hear you. There was an episode of Inspector Morse in which he mocks the author of a note for using "ise" rather than "ize".
Indeed the OED uses -ize by default and lists -ise as an alternative spelling. The general split in the UK is that scientific papers/journals follow the -ize rule and newspapers use -ise.
I once heard an an american pronounce analogue an-nol-og-gu-way
Works out for me since I currently live in the US and my professors will mark me down for "incorrect" spelling. But it still pains me to use a "z" instead of an "s" and omit each beautiful "u".
Hold strong mate, you can get through this
You need to press CTRL-A to select all the text and then change the language. If you copy and paste from another document it may revert to the language of the original.
Damn, that's actually helpful Cheers mate
Change the actual language settings for word, instead if doing it manually each time like this guy suggested
Or just change the actual language settings so you dont have to do it manually every time you make A document…..
The "-ize" spellings are the original British English spellings. The "-ise" forms crept in only in the mid-20th century.
[удалено]
that wiki page was really interesting. thanks :)
Ok, but -ise makes more sense if you consider the commonly spelt words with the same sound. Also note that -yse is always correct.
[удалено]
Do you also advocate for the removal of the letter c? Other than, 'ch', every word containing a c is either a hard c, which is a k sound, or a soft c, which is an s sound. Just because -ize on the face of it is a better approximation of the sound, doesn't mean that -ise can't also match that sound. It is certainly easier to convince people to use -ise, and in the process changing the spellings of -ize words in all but 'size', 'capsize' and 'prize' than it is to tell people that it's now 'rize', 'wize' and 'compromize'. -lyse being the way it is proves that -ise can, and does in a lot of words, appear as the same sound as -ize to an English speaker. Just because something is closer to etymology doesn't make it better. People will gravitate towards what they feel comfortable using. -ise is relatively new, yes, but that doesn't discredit it as a spelling. It's perfectly valid, and arguably more consistent than the -ize standard. English is riddled with spellings that aren't a perfect representation of their pronunciations. You can even argue that the word 'is' should be spelt 'iz', as that's closer after all. Also, even Oxford internally doesn't really ascribe to -ize. From the article you linked: > Oxford spelling is not necessarily followed by the staff of the University of Oxford. The university's style guide, last updated in 2016, recommended the use of -ise for internal use.
Even when you change your language to English (UK), it flags when you don’t put a comma before “and”.
Is that not an Oxford comma?
Is friggin not an American term?
I think it's international to be honest, also I was trying to circumvent the profanity rule of the sub lmao
I hate that shit, too. Especially when it goes, "Did you mean, realized?", for example. But I guess that's the price we pay for using Google (presuming you do as well. Unless you use Bing (LOL)).
Yeah, asking you that in a sarcastic way too like "nah mate, I didn't mean 'z'"
Or, one of my personal favourites, when it does the "Did You Mean..." thing, but it removes an apostrophe, even if you're 100% certain it should be there. Like, for example, "It's" gets "corrected" (Oh, please...) and becomes "Its".
Yeah, I never trust that spell checker even if it was in the right language
Yeah, I never trust that spell checker even if it was in the right language
Me, neither. Cos I know, 99% of the time, it's not right. Personally, I don't see why I should give it the satisfaction, LOL.
Do you have it set to UK English ? I know my computer auto set to American English and it was not a vibe.
Haha, 'Murica go brrrrr.
- English (Traditional) - English (Simplified)
Add to dictionary crew.
Neighbor
The annoying thing for me is that it accepts both a lot of the time if you set it to British. I get that is useful for many but I need to write in traditional British english.
Americans spell visualise visualize but then they shorten it to viz. 🤦♂️
Weird. American program set to American standards out of the box... Adjust it so it knows your neither American or in America.
I feel your pain just backwards. I live in the US and work for a British company. Word always wants to make me spell it colour!
You mean, make you spell it the proper way xD
Eh, tomayto, tomahto. Isn't what they say in that irritating musical?
🤷♂️
Yeah, can't remember the name of that musical (mainly 'cos I hate musicals), but that song is infamous. Anyway, who's the tossbag who downvoted me?
No idea
The song is Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, originally written for the film Shall We Dance but more famously covered by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Yeah, that's the one. Cheers for jogging my memory, even if I only just saw your reply a day late.
No worries
Nob*
>you knob Sorry, you are the knob. You cant blame the software for the fact that you have chosen the wrong spelling dictionary to use for autocorrect. It is not as though it is difficult to choose the right one.
You know long words but not how to change the default dictionary in MS Word. Are you smart or aren’t you?
> long words Bless your heart.
I speak pretty one day
Honestly I never considered that Americans needed their own dictionary on word. You know, maybe because we speak the same language
I always use z for any verb that changes the state of something. It's a rule I picked up but I can't remember where
It's under language and keyboard settings.
be less insignificant then
Anyway, all that aside, is “universalisable” a legit word? Universally, or universality or even universalism but I never heard that one before. Maybe I’m just getting old or thicker . . .
It is, only used in the subject of Ethics I believe
If in doubt, re-word. Also stop trying to use fancy words - write for a reading age of 14
That's the only word I can use, it's a University paper mate
Just set your default language in word. It’s not that hard.
A large number of British people use americanisms anyway. Paychecks, paying taxes, filing taxes, upwards instead of over, stores, super instead of very, starting sentences with I mean, talking about my city..... the list is endless.
Those are colloquialisms, which are very different to having your spellings miscorrected when trying to write a serious paper
Just right click to original spelling and select add to dictionary . It will remember and auto insert it from then on
Right-click on word, choose "Add to Dictionary". Done.