Mihai - Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. If seeing and hearing the word fall used instead of autumn drives you nuts, this must be a very difficult time of year for you. :-)

I'm not the forum police or anything, but do you know that this forum has a Conversations section for posts that are off the topic of cottage gardening? It's a great place for humor and other entertaining topics.

Regards,
ThinMan

Hi Mihai,
Never given the matter much thought but here in Canada most of the folks I know say Fall rather then Autumn. Maybe we associate it with falling leaves which there seem to be no end of at least in my garden. When I think Autumn I think of warm days, cool nights, gentle breezes, Indian Summer.
Fall brings to mind the leaves are now starting to change colour/color, both are correct in my mind, one starts getting whiffs of wood smoke in the air, love it. Soon we will be dealing with mountains of leaves to be shredded and composted and being the weather is unpredictable this can be a hassle.
Not only do some of us spell some words differently we also pronounce them differently, no big deal as far as I'm concerned, to each his own. Mind you there is a word, schedule, I prefer to pronouce it as skedule not shedule. Why because I went to skool not shoul.
Because I come from an English background I pick up a lot of lets say british humor/humour that others miss. We all come from different backgrounds so do some things differently and thank goodness for that, life would be so boring if we were all the same.
Annette

Yep, we Canadians neither ran from the Brits nor kept to the word Autumn, though it does get used almost equally I would say.....
Interestingly enough, if I remember correctly, the Puritans came to America not only for religious freedom, but also to protect the English language. They felt that slang was creeping too freely into their beloved language in England. Isn't it ironic! A few generations later, Mr. Webster sat down to simplify the 'English' language. He decided, and others must have agreed, that the spellings were complicated and used too many unnecessary letters. Hence, 'u' disappeared from many words, axe lost it's 'e'; night became nite. I remember as a child being horrified that my lovely Canadian Aunt, who had moved to the Florida Keys, wrote me a letter, and used thru, instead of through!!! Mum became Mom - what up with that??? I heard a speech by Michael J. Fox, on his induction into the Canadian Walk of Fame last month, talking about his 'Canadianisms' when he first broke out 'Family Ties'. He said, there was a point towards the ends of the show, when having screwed up and pissed everyone off, he would go to his mother, and say, 'Mommm', except he would say 'Mumm'. He was sure he would be fired for this transgression!!! lol. As if.

Anyway, some musings from North of the 49th!!

Nancy.

Nite? I must have missed that memo.

As far as I know its still night,

Get with the PROGRAMME people! lol

Mihai

(PS, Mihai is a crazy Romanian that will say anything for a laugh or is it now, laff? lol)

I say what floats your boat....

This topic is a sore point with me. My mother is from England. She caused me a lot of grief when I was a kid by trying to make me conform my speech and accent to her's. At school the teachers and other kids took a dim view of the way I spoke, and constantly corrected me or made fun of me. Spelling and sentence construction were problems, too. American school kids aren't allowed to stick a "u" into the words you listed. According to American grammar, my sentence structure is backwards.

To this day, people ask me what country I am from. Irratates the heck out of me, because I was born an American. Being Romanian, Mihai, you can get away with speaking and writing English rather than "American". You aren't likely to be faulted for it.

Lorna

(((Lorna))) I know what you mean about conforming to what is thought to be the right and proper way, right and proper for who? Sometimes life really sucks while you're growing up and it can really do a number on you.
My motto: You haven't got a hope in .... of pleasing everybody so you might as well please yourself.

Whatever you had to deal with you have handled it beautifully, because from what I've seen on this forum you are a warm caring person and a pretty smart cookie in my book. It doesn't get any better.
Annette

Lorna, Annette got it right. My poor southern cousins....The youngest, 8 or 9 at the time had a southern accent by the time they hit the Georgia border!!! The eldest, 11, still craved snow and leaves changing colours, etc. They are today, still the same. One is a southern belle, the other is a citizen of the world. And I love them both.
Lorna, your Mum wanted you to be better, in her opinion. That is why she insisted on the 'English' way. The English did, and still do, believe that their way is the best!!! It's why Canada and Australia ended up with all of the crap about the residential schools...the English thought there was nothing better that they could do than turn everyone into proper little Englishmen.

Oops, sorry, there I was on my soapbox again!!!!

Nancy.

Hahahahahaha

First, I must say that although I am Romanian, I'm told I speak English better than most native speakers. Also, I teach at a private boarding school here in Connecticut and have a part time job to fund my wife's expensive tastes. Most if not all of the people I work with are envious of my command of the English language and they believe me to be somewhat a snob. No one, but no one, makes fun of me.

For Nancy:

"the English thought there was nothing better that they could do than turn everyone into proper little Englishmen".

King George II, not much for being King, and wanting nothing more then to be left alone, charged Parliament with one order which he thought would keep them busy.

"Make all the world England"!!! and they spent the next 200 years or so doing just that.

Annette:

I have visited Canada a number of times and Ive always found them to be the most British acting of the North Americans. They seem to spell things the British way and seem to even have some of the same holidays. I also have only ever heard Autumn used there. That's not to say there isn't an exception to every rule.

Enough said,
Mihai

The term "North Americans" isn't used on this continent, Mihai. We are identified by nation, such as Canadian, American, Mexican, Guatemalan, El Salvadorian, etc. It isn't appropriate to lump us all together as North Americans. Your Anglophile beliefs about Canada would get you into a lot of trouble in the province of Quebec. The culture in Quebec is French Canadian. The Quebecers, the Quebecquois, eschew Angloism. The term used here, for those descended from British culture, is Anglo-American. We have three prevalent languages on this continent: English, Spanish and French.

Thanks for understanding, Annette and Nancy. My mother's accent nets her quite a lot of attention, which she relishes. Strangers come up to her and coo, "Oh, you are ENNNNNNGGGGGLISH, I can tell by your accent!" Funny how she embraced America by becoming a naturalized citizen, yet clings to her Brit ways for the attention she gets. However, I am proud of my mother for attaining American citizenship.

Nancy, the teacher, who faulted me the most for my accent, spoke with a heavy Southern drawl. Neither the teacher nor my mother spoke with the accent commonly used in that location. Yet they both were on my back every day to speak as they did. I eventually learned that they were both snobs!

When I was studying the Japanese language, my primary tutor taught me a formal, old-fashioned style. Two of the other Japanese people who tutored me told me nobody speaks like that anymore, it isn't modern speech. In learning Spanish, I encountered similar idiosyncrasies. There is a vast difference in using language by the rules, and commonly accepted usage.

All of the major languages have multiple dialects. Each country has a unique version of the language, and within large countries, dialects can be incredibly different. One example in America is the word milkshake. In some areas a milkshake is simply called a shake, it can also be called a frappe, or a cabinet, and perhaps other words with which I am not familiar! If a Bostonian visited New Mexico and asked for a frappe, the locals wouldn't have a clue as to what the Bostonian wanted.

Lorna

It isn't just regional. There are linguists who can pinpoint a specific area. Someone I knew moved to Alaska.

One of her professors asked, "In which county in southwest Georgia did you live?" after she said something like, "I might could have done (something)"

Nell

Many years ago, when I was just 21 to be exact, I travelled with a friend down to Boston for a long weekend- the May 2-4( this may be an Ontario-ism, as the weekend used to fall around the 24th of the month, and we call a case of beer a two four) or Victoria's Birthday! Anyway, we went out to a club on Saturday night, in the market area. The doorman stopped me at the door, and asked for my 'cod'. I stared at him in disbelief!!!! He wanted what??!!! In frustration he said, your cod, your cod, your ID - oh, got it!!! lol!! Now, in Ontario, I had been drinking legally for 3 years....Funny now!!
So, use of language, accents - I wish I could remember who said we were separated by a common lauguage!! Oh yes, and someone once told me they thought the Canadian accent reminded them of the Massachusetts' accent - naa-uh.

I love "might could", Nell. I get the biggest kick out of that, and I sometimes use it myself! I had thought that colloquialism originated in Texas. Quite a few Anglos in New Mexico speak with southern accents. Some are descendants of Confederate soldiers, the accent has been passed down through generations!

There are a lot of relocated Canadians and descendants of Canadians in Massachusetts, Nancy. I agree that the accent for Anglo Canadians is similar to a Massachusetts, or New England, accent. In my own family, three of my paternal great grandparents came down from Canada. One of them came from an area in Nova Scotia where Scots Gaelic was the predominant language. (Martha Mora told me that my great gran probably came from Cape Breton, where Scots Gaelic is still prevalent.)

One of my uncles, who married into the family, calls himself a Canuck. His heritage is French Canadian. He speaks French and English. There are some French Canadian communities in Massachusetts where French is the language people speak in their homes. I'm from Salem, which is near Boston. One of the Catholic churches in Salem celebrates two masses each Sunday in French. I attended one of the French services once.

I used to know an older woman, who came from a French speaking Canadian family. She was born in Massachusetts. She didn't begin to learn English until she entered the first grade. She told me English was very difficult for her to learn because her parents would not allow her to speak English in their house!

Lorna

Thank you for the history lessons and proper grammar innuendo.

This is a friendly forum and I don't take kindly to snobbish behavior. I don't find your humor the least bit funny.

By the way, in your last paragraph, there should be an apostrophe in the word "I've". Proper "English language" you know.

A foreign physician to whom I had to explain a pun once told me that humor does not translate.

Humor sometimes falls flat in a forum.

I'm told I speak English better than most native speakers. Also, I teach at a private boarding school here in Connecticut and have a part time job to fund my wife's expensive tastes. Most if not all of the people I work with are envious of my command of the English language and they believe me to be somewhat a snob. No one, but no one, makes fun of me.

::eyes rolling heavenward:: -- Pride goeth before a fall, my friend!

Oops, I messed up. I could have sworn that I was reading this post in the Discussions section when I pointed out to Mihai that we have a Conversations section. Guess he already knew that. Sorry, Mihai.

Will the humor be starting soon?.

ThinMan

You were reading it in the Discussions section, TM. I saw it there too. Then it was here.

You reckon the spirit of Spike lives?

My grandmother, a Scottish governess lived with us when I was small. It seemed every that sentence I spoke she'd correct me. I can hear her now. Most likely what she said to her charges before the 1900s.

"I have" not "I've got."
You can't start a sentence with And or But.
"Free" not "for free".

Heaven help me if I said eh.
and on and on.........
It was OK because I loved her.

Libby

Yes, TM, it was on the 'other side' when it started. I rather thought that I had lost it when I came back to respond. Not sure who Spike was, before my time, then again, I only knew the Discussions side!!!

So, Nell, TM, we're OK - the origin, not so much!!!

Nancy.