Maybe. But I still remember in the 80s, when I was living in Europe, and we went on a trip to London ... and I bought a transformer. I got it back to the hotel and I read the instructions on how to transform it, and wondered what the hell 'lift the bonnet' and 'open the boot' meant'.

These days, I still have to beware of recipes on the internet -- if I see the word 'coriander', I have to wonder ... if it's British, it'd be what Americans call cilantro. If it's American, it's what the Brits call coriander seed. Of course, you also have to know the age of the recipe, as what we call 'milk' today used to be called 'sweet milk' while 'milk' referred to butter milk. (and 'buttermilk' today is runny yogurt, not what was left over from the butter churning)

The point is -- depending on exactly what you're presenting and what's being presented, it has the potential to be misinterpreted, and then you run into both the recipient and the originator blaming each other. Just because you've seen some Americanisms doesn't mean that you've seen every one, and when you're dealing with dialects of the 'same' language, you run into cases where the recipient may think they understood and be wrong -- you've probably seen it if you have a non-technical manager and you try to explain something in technical jargon where a word has a different meaning in the technical context. (eg, make sure you don't use the word 'hack' when you don't mean 'crack')

In reply to Re^5: Perl to convert US to UK punctuation/spelling? by jhourcle
in thread Perl to convert US to UK punctuation/spelling? by freewheel

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