Guest post by WUWT moderator Andi Cockroft
I wrote the other week of an Evening With His Lordship – aka Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley – in which I outlined his presentation made here in New Zealand.
Many commenters seemed to take issue with my spelling of “sceptic” – which of course is correct for an Anglo Saxon such as I, or some berated my referral to Christopher as “His Lordship” – which of course is equally correct for an Anglo Saxon – it is simply courtesy after all.
I do point out that most of my adult life has been spent developing computer “programs”, which read and write to “disk” (although I do sometimes rebel and use a disc) – and when the painful necessity arises, I can even spell “initialize” – so I am quite adaptable to US English when needed.
Hopefully here though, attending a presentation by Catherine Leining, one of New Zealand’s only two disciples of Al Gore, should prove less contentious – with I suspect very few real sceptics in the auditorium.
I had hoped to report quite dispassionately and simply compare the arguments put forward by Christopher and those by Catherine – but regrettably that is just not possible.
The two presentations could have not be further apart in technique had they tried.
Whilst Christopher mixed wit, scientific argument and many citations, the pitch by Catherine was primarily emotive.
Introduced by Wellington’s Green Mayor, Celia Wade-Brown, the first 25 minutes were spent on who Catherine was. The presentation proper started just before 6pm.
But none of the scientific papers, charts, graphs, comparisons etc of Monckton – no – here was weather in all its forms: floods, droughts, winds, snow – you name it – suddenly it is “weather is climate”.
Plenty of quotes – Hansen, Trenberth et al but surprisingly no mention of Mann ! None of which said anything other than “it’s worse than we thought”
Prof James Renwick was there to lend support, a leading light at NIWA in earlier times, now an associate Professor at Wellington’s Victoria University
From left to right: Mayor Celia Wade-Brown, Catherine Leining and James Renwick
But I digress. There was a slide with a couple of graphs on there, and I can report that not only is the hockey stick alive and well, it has a twin!!!
I wasn’t quick enough on the camera to capture the image, but the ever-so-typical Mannian flat-line with the uptick to infinity was shown above an almost identical graph showing CO2 concentrations in ppm – also heading skyward to infinity.
Of course this was followed almost immediately by the graphs comparing historic 10 (or was it 20) millennia temperature versus CO2 concentrations. The granularity of which was totally incapable of allowing any interpretation of what preceded what.
More CAGW threats followed, with the typical underwater Maldives stunt, and dire warnings of “likely” temperatures around the globe if we fail to act.
At no time was there any attempt to discuss or explain Climate Sensitivity, Albedo (other than briefly during Q&A), ENSO, Ocean Heat, Aerosols, Proxies, Solar Maxima… the list of missing discussions is almost endless
Towards the end, I was quite surprised that there were no “tipping points” – but in quick successions these were three – but so monumental were they that I forget what they were – something about public opinion I think.
A long presentation on what must be done (but not why it should be done), with windmills, solar, battery cars for all, self-sufficiency for Africa, Carbon Trading, bio-fuels, no more coal, no more bad oil – although apparently “Z” (a brand-name for Shell Petroleum over here) are the good guys and Exxon the bad guys
Towards the end, a series of “red herrings” – it’s the Sun (apparently not), warming has stopped (apparently not), there is no consensus (oh yes there is – 98% climate scientists agree), it’s all based on models (no it’s not), CO2 is a beneficial gas (no it’s not it’s harmful) and a few others.
In all, a very different style of presentation from His Lordship’s more scientific fact-based presentation, this one based primarily on assumptions that the CO2 theory is already fact and that we must act – but no justification of the underlying science to prove the affirmations.
Q&A was interesting – I asked why NIWA (responsible for the Climate record in NZ) was reporting temperature increases twice the global average – according to James Renwick no it’s not – it’s only about 10% above average – I’ll check that one.
Interesting discussion around polar temperatures (and this is where albedo was touched on), and apparently Antarctica is thawing just as much as the Arctic – it just has more ice so will take longer.
Finally, I knew it had to happen. NZ emits about 47% of its GHG’s from agriculture. A fervent Vega sitting in the gallery insists that if we all took Vitamin B12 supplements, we could all relinquish our addiction to beef and save all that flatulence.
On that note, I left. But since I had missed my evening meal to attend this presentation, I stopped off for a curry on the way home – if that doesn’t add methane to the atmosphere I don’t know what will.
Andi
She was preaching to the choir about stuff already settled and certain, as you were aware.
Activists are beyond questioning the cause of things, as they should be: no activism should start until the cause-effect relationship has concluded. And since NIWA has been “vindicated” by its earlier lawsuit/re-do, there is no point in questioning the NIWA data in such a situation.
Putting a question to such a one at such a gathering goes back to the validity of the entire evening. Can be done, but these people are supporters of orthodox authority. Until you can stand up and say that Gore or the NZ Met Service have come out critically against CAGW projections, there is no ammunition that can go up against what is, in essence, a ghost.
There is no substance to the activist speech – as you noted. It’s all emotional rallying of the troops, just as exhortations of joining the fight against the Hun in WWI had no discussions about the place any New Zealander had in the European war.
The only question that might be worthy has to do with why, with all the settledness and certainty, after 25 years of world study (post 1988) the outcome for the next fifty years was no better defined now that in the beginning. Not just the temperature rise, but the effects, have the same range as to begin with. It is as if all the work and observations have had no impact on their models, because by now we really should have a better idea than a 1 – 6 C rise in temps or a 0.2 – 6.0m rise in sea level.
The answer would require a rebuttal, of course, which you would not get, but the point might be of a type that an activist would have to deal with, like an anti-hunger activist being unable, after years of work, to tell you how many people needed to be fed.
Most Americans are clewless about British English.
So disheartening. They’re all parroting this narrative by rote now. What’s sad is that, after this scandal is finally exposed and discredited, people like this woman’s reputations will emerge without a stain. None of them will be held to account for the damage they have wreaked on the world. “Oops, never mind” and on to the next redistributive scam.
Jorgekafkazar: Americans use different spellings as a result of our earlier history. After the Revolution, the leadership decided that with peoples from all the various countries that made up these new United States and with the influx of other peoples and various pronounciations already extant that a standardized (and more rational-although not totally rational) spelling might be in order – hence Webster’s New Dictionary. A lot of our spelling differences can be traced back to that effort.
That’s an interesting report. I read your comments about Shell and ExxonMobil. As a Shell shareholder (I own some ExxonMobil, as well), I spent a couple of hours over the weekend reading the firm’s 2012 Form 20-F (the equivalent of a 10-K for foreign-domiciled firms with qualifying U.S.-listed shares) filing for the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission.
It’s been a number of years since I last read this report which must be filed annually. I was horrified; Shell has completely capitulated. I’ve never seen such groveling and kowtowing. I’m sure it reflects Shell’s European residence and an expedient effort to avoid provoking the CO2 crazies who reside there.
If skeptic is spelled sceptic in British English, is skip spelled scip?
I can sympathize, not so much with sitting through insanity, but with spelling. As a child I read voraciously and frequently got spelling tests wrong because I assumed that “colour” was just another way to spell “color.” I had no idea that they spell some words differently in various Anglophone countries around the world, and insisted that I’d seen that spelling in a book so it must be correct.
But as for the insanity, I teach high school, so I guess I sit through quite a bit of it, actually. 🙂
To quote Churchill, ” two great nations divided by a common language.”
Well, that explains a lot about Ms. Catherine. Maybe someone should tell Catherine Leining that vitamin supplements are not readily absorbed in the body. The next time you pee, just about every last bit of your vitamin supplement goes out your body. Not all of it of course but almost all. The only proper way to get vitamins is food and drink, and meat is the best source for B12.
However, I will admit that farm animals are not treated properly and sometimes slaughtered inhumanely. If I had my way, all animals would be required to eat a diet with no growth hormones and the animals would be required to have clean living spaces.
‘the first 25 minutes were spent on who Catherine was.’ a sure sign , if ever there was one , that what would follow would be rubbish .
Regarding spelling. I always called the American way of spelling the easier way to spell words. Spelling in this language is already hard enough, why make it harder?
Kerb/curb, tyre/tire, big deal!
AGW is popular with politicians and their sycophants and coat-tail-riders because it dooes not require the use of facts, reproducible experiments, applied logic, or any other taxing intellectual processes. It only demands sufficient rhetoric to persuade/intimidate the low-information voters into supporting the politicians and their veiled quest for increased power and control over everything.
Leave the difficult mental processes to the vanishing species call ‘critical thinkers.’
Ah, yes… curried methane.
I’m surprised (or is it surprized? It is easy for a non-AngloAmerican to get lost in these linguistic details) that she still used the Maldives underwater stunt; it is after all some time since the new president of the Maldives assured the world that the island nation was not sinking after all. No doubt to calm investors who would hesitate to spend money in a doomed country.
A fact not often taught in school is that the Boston T Party was soon followed by the Boston U Party, in which a group of patriots disguised as grammar teachers yanked all the redundant U’s out of words like “color” and threw them into Boston Harbour. … er, Harbor…. whatever…
Pathway,
I believe it was Bernard Shaw who said that, not Churchill (who probably happily quoted Shaw, and possibly without attribution.)
ConTrari,
Surprised is correct. Even for those of use who speak/read/write American English as their first language, these details can be confusing. We get an instinctive feel for some of these issues, but I doubt anyone other than an English Major could actually provide a coherent rule for when we use ize vs ise.
The former “Dutch Royal Shell” company thought it better to conceal their connections to Dutch Queen Beatrice….and British Petroleum went to “BP” as “Beyond Petroleum”. The monarch-monopolists like playing mind/word games….and credit default science scams on subjects and little people.
Just be careful with the insertion of timely spaces between words or
A sceptic
becomes
Asceptic
Lorry, truck, petrol, gasoline what’s the difference? I’m sure that Ms Lemming is only looking out for the good of humankind just as much as I understand the spelling comparisons in the previous posts.
Andi Cockroft:
You say
Interesting. I am reminded of the debate at St Andrews University which Monckton, Morner and I won.
I provide an account of it here
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=2938
Richard
How to pronounce ghiti?
Read about this in the 8th grade and it stuck. It was a short essay on spelling and the odd pronunciation of pairs of letters.
It’s amazing sometimes how names and appearance can match mental outlook. For example Catherine Leinin…..g and she does look quite a bit like Christine O’Donnell. Just sayin….
A wry smile was evoked by the dystopian title of an evening entitled: ‘Climate Reality Presentation’, conducted it seems, by the expected line-up of intellectually bankrupt, NZ wealth re-distribution champions from the Council Chambers, Wellington Town Hall speaks volumes about local politics and leadership in New Zealand.
M Kelly gave us “ghiti” I can’t help thinking that there’s something fishy about it!
With the state of the comtemporary American education system, most Americans remain clueless about American English.
As I understand it, only the US and the Philippines follow US spelling rules; all other English-speaking countries, including our neighbor Canada, follow British spelling rules.
The Philippines advertises itself as the second-largest English-speaking country, and nearly everybody there is fluent in English, although there are probably more people in India that speak English as their first language, or equally natively as they do another language.
On another point: New Zealand does tax farm animal flatulence. One would think that to enforce this, you would have to have inspectors standing behind each farm animal holding a balloon to catch and measure the gas each time the animal farts. That would overjoy the people who want to grow bureaucracy to infinity. But I’m guessing that some blatherskite did some “research” to establish grossly exaggerated parameters for CO2 and CH4 production by animals – just as the Australian government is doing with water usage, to compel farmers to surrender their water rights as punishment for “excessive usage.”
The persistence of the AGWers’ mendacity in the face of such overwhelming proof of its fecal character, and their evident utter allergy to reasoned discourse and immunity to the truth, make you wonder whether it will ever be possible to stop them by any means short of superior physical force.
jorgekafkazar says:
April 29, 2013 at 11:19 am
Most Americans are clewless about British English.
I know. The English invented the language, you’d think they know it better ;^)
GlynnMhor says:
April 29, 2013 at 12:04 pm
“Ah, yes… curried methane.”
Kind of what it smells like….
G.S. Williams says:
April 29, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Good one. You got it. ghiti can be pronounced like fish. gh as in enough, i as in it, ti is the sh sound as in the -tion like in nation.
The English may have created the language, but Americans perfected it.
I believe the original circumphonetic spelling was GHOTI, with an O: GH as in LAUGH, O as in WOMEN, TI as in MOTION = FISH.
Somehow, still more logical and scientifically defensible than AGW.
Renwick looks like he is being dressed by St Vincent de Paul. Doesn’t Victoria University pay its faculty?
Richardcourtney, Sorry Richard a debate is a formal arguement and you can never win an arguement with an idiot or three. sarc/
Thanks Andi. Well done.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“It’s a small mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”
Andrew Jackson
johninoxley:
I am giving a serious reply although I noticed your sarc.
As you say, it is not possible to win an argument with AGW cultists.
However, the vote said we won the debate in the views of the students.
As I said in my report of the debate
And as I also said
It was that assumption and lack of evidence of which I was reminded by the above report by Andi Cockroft.
Richard
PS For convenience of anyone who wants to find it, the link to my report of the debate is
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=2938
@ mkelly
LOL, yes, in Finnegans Wake, James Joyce wrote, “Gee each owe tea eye smells fish.”
Have you noticed that New Zealand, itself, is a Hockey Stick?
I’m confident Celia Wade-Brown will be on her bike following October’s election.
Thanks for the fine report from the front lines, Andi. And, thank you for making the fun subject of English useage NOT off topic. Delightful comments were elicited.
@ Dave B. [1633 on 4/29/13] good! Say… is “on her bike” New Zealandish for “hit the highway” (in “American”)? [#:o)]
Or does it just mean she’ll be unemployed, thus unable to afford gas, er, I mean petrol, anymore?
MattS
Most people mistakenly think that ‘ize’ is correct in American (and Filipino) English and ‘ise’ correct in British English. The correct answer is it depends on whether the root of the word was originally Greek (ize) or Latin (ise). Hence I might denationalise organisations on my way to democratizing a country. And, yes, I am an English major.
Only problem is, hardly anybody knows the origins of the words they use. (Latin helps.) So we stick by the conventions of ‘ize’ in America and ‘ise’ pretty much everywhere else.
I enjoyed hearing Lord Monkton at his second to last New Zealand Venue in Gore. He gave a brilliant and humourous presentation that was well received by the 50 or so attendees. One comment he made really shows the Gore effect is not just limited to warmists. From late last year right through to the start of this month New Zealand had been suffering from a severe draught. He noted that every place that he attended had its first significant rain as soon as he arrived. I rode my motorcycle 2 hours from draught stricken Central Otago to torrential rain in Southland. Next time he should come a month earlier and also visit Central Otago.
‘ I can even spell “initialize” ‘
The OED (the One True Dictionary) is full of “ize” spellings for English (as distinct from American) words. But during the second world war, many of the zeds in Europe were destroyed. Since European languages (and especially Eastern European languages) are heavily dependent on this letter, Britain hastily began exporting as many as it could. This left a major shortage of zeds in Britain, so the British took to using esses instead. The US could not help, since it only had zees, which, of course, would not do at all.
The “ise”spelling seems to have totally taken over Australia.
“apparently Antarctica is thawing just as much as the Arctic – it just has more ice so will take longer.”
Unfortunately for them, no it isn’t. According to UAH, the region 60 to 85 degrees South is showing a decided cooling trend. See http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/the-missing-fingerprints-of-greenhouse-warming-part-2/
Dave B says:
April 29, 2013 at 4:33 pm
I’m confident Celia Wade-Brown will be on her bike following October’s election.
—————————————–
I gotta tell you Dave watch out. I thought the same thing about Obama.
Usually if the economy is bad the sitting prez gets ousted.
Obama beat the odds.
Did he end the wars?…No!
Did he fix immigration?…No!
Did he fix gay rights?…No!
Did he kill the XL Pipeline?…No!
Did he get Cap and Trade?…No!
I figured he was doomed from his own supporters.
Democrats held Both Houses of Congress and the Oval Office.
But he still got out the vote.
Republicans put up one of the few people Obama could get the average person to dislike, distrust and even hate. A 1%er.
Also, someone many independents would not get off the couch to vote for.
Good luck.
cn
Canada is the language (and measurements) hybrid I guess. We keep our nice u’s but the ultimate test of a language is whether they go to inane lengths to say al-you-min-eeum rather than aluminum. You don’t have to pronounce extra u’s at least. I didn’t know the Phillipines were so English speaking. Interestingly the guy I met from there was at the same company that I learned about aluminium from an Irish guy.
I didn’t take issue with your spelling, but with your claim that sceptic was the correct spelling, which you knew thanks to your classical education. I quoted Fowler in rebuttal, who observed that the word comes from the Greek, in which the “k” is used. Webster’s dictionary went back to that root, which is why Americans spell it his way. It makes sense to do so, as Fowler pointed out, for the sake of better agreement between spelling and pronunciation.
I think you meant “Britisher,” not “Anglo-Saxon.” Anglo-Saxons in the US spell it skeptic.
Here’s Fowler:
Ah, well, in the UK, it is spelled ‘ghoti’, where the ‘o’ is pronounced as in ‘women’, who sometimes like to style themselves ‘wimmin’.
The following is offered for the particular amusement of the cognescenti (a word underlined by the pathetic foxed word checker in use on this site) of Erudition. (A person is said to be erudite, when instruction and reading followed by digestion and contemplation, have effaced all raw, untrained incivility).
Those without the necessary mindset to enjoy a gentle ribbing should read no further. As Willis would have it, “You have been warned”.
American spellings are dysgenic. English spellings map the route by which words from other languages became incorporated into English. Greek, Latin, French and Hindi, all loaned words to English. By deliberate diminishment of the intellectual level of the content of schooling , spelling and education, as posited by Rhoda R says: April 29, 2013 at 11:29 am, Noah (Know all) Webster & the American founding fathers apparently forgot that second generation immigrants to the colonies would have no more difficulties in learning English “as she is spoke” than all the migrants to the British Isles over the previous centuries. I suggest that the contradictions of Webster’s lexicography arose because the poor bastard could not spell “Etymology”, which, as everyone knows, is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. The word etymology is derived from the Greek etymon, meaning true sense and the suffix -logia, denoting the study of.
Americanisms take second place to a much more important consideration, not mentioned previously. English, according to Wikipedia, is the THIRD mostly widely spoken language, after Mandrin Chinese and Spanish. I suggest that the jolly old US of A is on a slippery downhill slope to where the nation’s ability to speak with clarity to other nations will be even more sorely compromised than it is at present. Obummer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
Ça par exemple, oOoo, VAY, & DOOBBLE VAY in foreign and YOU, VEE & DOUBLE YOU in English. The French mispronounce W as V, hence it’s Vagon Lee rather than Wagon Lits and Ouest for west and Guillaume for William. However, to return 350 million literary savages to the languages of Chaucer Milton and Shakespeare is akin Samuel Johnson’s observation; “Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
I applaud all those who made it to here without apoplexy. Those who feel constrained to protest, I suggest a cold bath.
I prefer sceptics. I think it looks better than skeptics.
Re: oOoo, VAY:
In America it is common to say “oy vey” when encountering such. Occasionally the wiki can be helpful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oy_vey
Well hopefully her exhortations to what must be done are confined to Wellington City Council areas of authority.
Not surprised her profile shows Government Departments, Government Agencies, and public policy research. Probably not exposed to any real life at any point.
The CAGW catechism does not seem to vary much. Don’t they have anything new to say after all these years?
Re: “-ise” vs “-ize”
Depends. Do you prefer “size” or “sise” ? Heh. When desperate go for “sighs”.
“If I had my way, all animals would be required to eat a diet with no growth hormones and the animals would be required to have clean living spaces.”
Clean mud for pigs then?
the blame for removing the “u” from colour and spelling sceptic
as skeptic can be laid squarely at the feet of Noah Webster.
He published a “speller” at the end of the eighteenth century in
which he started to “clean up” the American language. He made
more changes in each subsequent edition although his attempt
to change “tongue” to “tung” never caught on.
At least George Bernard Shaw was not so tempted, although he
came close in Pygmalion. It was a good analysis and documentation
of Cockney …
if that doesn’t add methane to the atmosphere I don’t know what will.
As I’m sure His Lordship could inform you, this is a very common misconcention. Most humans farts are hydrogen based, not methane. Different intestinal fauna, don’t you know.
alexwade says: April 29, 2013 at 11:49 am
“…..If I had my way, all animals would be required to eat a diet with no growth hormones and the animals would be required to have clean living spaces….”
Just a few pedantic technicalities, I know of no growth hormones which can be fed. They are then simply seen as proteins and get digested.
Injection is the only way most can be administered and it must be daily or at least every second day, preferably in the evening when effects may be greatest. So, impractical, mostly regulated out of existence, and very rarely used where it is allowable. (But, I hope, completely harmless, as my daughter has been on injectable HGH for two years as she has Turner’s syndrome and does not produce her own GH.)
In any case, it is marvelous stuff, with effects in normal animals (and humans) mainly in improving growth on the same amount of nutrients (hey, efficiency!) and resulting in the laying down of more muscle and less fat (perhaps the source of that efficiency, fat is more ‘expensive’ in terms of nutrients to lay down than is muscle).
You may be thinking of the subcutaneous ear implants used on cattle, which are marvelously effective in improving feed use efficiency with minute amounts of gradually released hormones or hormone agonists, with the effect largely coming from the triggering effect of these on natural hormones in the body. But, in many places, with little reason or logic, these are now banned too.
Together with GM technology, I think this may perhaps be one of the essential requirements in our future efforts to efficiently feed the world.
Robert Wykoff says:
April 29, 2013 at 1:54 pm
The English may have created the language, but Americans perfected it.
and
Perry says:
April 30, 2013 at 12:49 am
The following is offered for the particular amusement of the cognescenti (a word underlined by the pathetic foxed word checker in use on this site) of Erudition. (A person is said to be erudite, when instruction and reading followed by digestion and contemplation, have effaced all raw, untrained incivility).
Those without the necessary mindset to enjoy a gentle ribbing should read no further. As Willis would have it, “You have been warned”.
American spellings are dysgenic. English spellings map the route by which words from other languages became incorporated into English. Greek, Latin, French and Hindi, all loaned words to English. By deliberate diminishment of the intellectual level of the content of schooling , spelling and education, as posited by Rhoda R says: April 29, 2013 at 11:29 am, Noah (Know all) Webster & the American founding fathers apparently forgot that second generation immigrants to the colonies would have no more difficulties in learning English “as she is spoke” than all the migrants to the British Isles over the previous centuries. I suggest that the contradictions of Webster’s lexicography arose because the poor bastard could not spell “Etymology”, which, as everyone knows, is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. The word etymology is derived from the Greek etymon, meaning true sense and the suffix -logia, denoting the study of.
Americanisms take second place to a much more important consideration, not mentioned previously. English, according to Wikipedia, is the THIRD mostly widely spoken language, after Mandrin Chinese and Spanish. I suggest that the jolly old US of A is on a slippery downhill slope to where the nation’s ability to speak with clarity to other nations will be even more sorely compromised than it is at present. Obummer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
Ça par exemple, oOoo, VAY, & DOOBBLE VAY in foreign and YOU, VEE & DOUBLE YOU in English. The French mispronounce W as V, hence it’s Vagon Lee rather than Wagon Lits and Ouest for west and Guillaume for William. However, to return 350 million literary savages to the languages of Chaucer Milton and Shakespeare is akin Samuel Johnson’s observation; “Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
I applaud all those who made it to here without apoplexy. Those who feel constrained to protest, I suggest a cold bath.
***********************************************************************************************
and all the other ‘language’ comments.
Does this mean the language is settled, or not ? 🙂
I will remain sceptical.
However, I do support the skientifik method. 🙂
Steve T
No, but “Leicester” somehow comes out as “Lester”. I don’t think either side of the pond should be preaching about pronunciation.
The “word checker” is in your browser, not on this site. Amusing indeed.
Peeple who obcess in public over other peeple’s speeling deserve the brittle heart that beets within there chests. I’m serial about this.
Wikipedia stats re speakers of languages are incorrect: only about 700 million Chinese speak Mandarin, which is mostly not mutually intelligible (except in writing) with other Chinese dialests, and perhaps another 300-400 million more speak Mandarin as a scond language. Only about 300 million speak Spanish (Mexico, 120 million, Spain 35 million (excluding Catalan), Colombia 40 million, other Latin America about 80 million, US 20 million). The third largest language in terms of native speakers is Hindi without about 550 million speakers. English is second with about 600 million native speakers (US, Philippines, UK, Ireland, Netherlands – yes, English is now the first language of a majority of the Dutch, much to the Dutch government’s chagrin – Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, West Indies, African countries), but when second-language speakers are counted, English dwarfs all others, with more than 2 billion speakers.
http://thesaurus.com/browse/sermon
jorgekafkazar says:
April 29, 2013 at 11:19 am
“Most Americans are clewless about British English.”
At this moment in history, British English is far more entertaining than American English. It seems that British English has not yet succumbed to political correctness. Give yourself a taste of British English at Andrew Montford’s website, for the comments, or James Delingpole’s website.
Perry says:
April 30, 2013 at 12:49 am
The following is offered for the particular amusement of the cognescenti (a word underlined by the pathetic foxed word checker in use on this site) …
When it’s underlined like that it means you spelt it incorrectly: try the correct spelling – cognoscenti and the underlining will go away.
OT, or maybe not!
For those interested in the history of the English language, I recommend Melvyn Bragg’s readable and informative book ‘The Adventure of English’, based on his TV series (might also be available on DVD).
According to him, many differences between modern American and British spellings arose because of a 19th century fad for French spellings among the English middle classes. American spellings tend to be the more traditional. Sorry to be siding with the rebellious colonials, but after reading that I have tended to prefer -ize over -ise!
I declare an interest, I am a UK citizen and use English English.)
According to Longman’s “Guide to English Usage” there are certain words which must be spelt with -ise, whether in American or English usage. These include:
advertise, advise, circumcise, revise, surprise …(by no means a complete list)
Some English English writers prefer to use -ise at all times to avoid being tricked by not having learnt the full list. Beyond that, either -ise or -ize is acceptable in English English and some publishers have chosen to use -ize in their style guides.
The advise from Longmans is to use either of the two but to try to be consistent.
(I enjoy pedantry about the English language! It might not be the bread and butter of WUWT but it’s fun occasionally.)
I found it funny too.
Ouch!
(He doesn’t have to try his own alternative spelling; he can just right-click on the word to see a list of suggestions.)
PS: re “cognescenti”:
Why can’t you just call him Christopher?? All this Down Under (and North American) sycophancy or whatever. He is a clever charmer, very right-wig, if a bit over the tip.
From a water melon who has had ‘tea’ with him, and shared a taxi with him an equally charming wife.
Only two questions worth asking
How much are you and you departmet costing us and what do we get out of it?
Followup question
If you had worked hard all your life would you use your retirement savings to hire you and you department?