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From: drg@rlvd.UUCP (Duncan Gibson)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: English Dialect, as seen by Americans
Message-ID: <345@rlvd.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-May-85 20:26:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlvd.345
Posted: Fri May  3 20:26:48 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 16-May-85 03:35:22 EDT
Reply-To: drg@rlvd.UUCP (Duncan Gibson)
Organization: Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, Atlas Buildings, U.K.
Lines: 20


I know that the rules of the net say that differences in spelling etc should
not be flamed about, so I suppose that might apply to this as well, but...

I have been reading net.nlang with some interest for a while. The thing that
amuses me most about the aticles, is that most of the comments made about
English (as opposed to American!) colloquialisms (sp?) are made by
Americans. Although there is nothing wrong with this, it should be noted
that a great many Brits are unaware of some of the dialect usage which many
American contributors appear to be experts on. Some of them may even be so,
but so many examples recently show that there is confusion. For example, the
phrase "I'm going to surgery" is uncommon, and is unlikely to be used to
mean "I'm going to the doctor's". The common usage of "I'm going INTO
surgery" means going into the operating theatre, but a doctor may use it to
mean that he was going to work, just as a councillor or Member of Parliament
might. 

Many of the phrases discussed so far have subtle variations, most of which
have different meanings depending on the context. Please do not take such a
context dependent phrase and generalise about the rest!