• CSK (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw

    Tbat's the WRONG cheek. Very wrong cheek...

  • Paolo G (unregistered) in reply to DropDeadThread
    DropDeadThread:
    whilst thee_value dominate not twenty_and_five
  procure thine data thusly
shouldst thou faileth thine task
  announce 'hear ye, hear ye!' 
return from whence you came

    I do love it when people try to write in archaic English and mess it up royally.

    Let's try that again.

    whilst the_value dominate not five_and_twenty
  procure thy data thus
shouldst thou fail thy task
  announce 'hear ye, hear ye!' 
return whence thou came

    Explanation...

    • It's "four and twenty blackbirds", not "twenty and four blackbirds".
    • "Thine" means "yours", as it "It is thine". "Thy" means "your", as it "hallowed be thy name". It was used instead of "thy" before a vowel, as in "thine eyes".
    • -eth was the third-person singular ending, which is -s in modern English. So "he faileth" (= he fails) but not "thou faileth" or anyone else faileth, for that matter.
    • -est was the second-person singular ending, so was only used with "thou" ("thou dost", "thou goest").
    • "Thusly" - "thus" is already an adverb, so why stick "-ly" on the end of it? This only came into being in the late 19th century according to dictionary.com, so it's an anachronism here.
    • "Whence" means "from where", so "from whence" is wrong. Yep, everyone says it, but it's wrong.
    • Oops, how did that last "you" creep in?
  • Dave (unregistered)

    'embiggoned', 'efface' ??

    Pot , kettle?

  • A Yankee (unregistered) in reply to A Brit

    Plain and simple. We invented it. Same reason why the telephone country code for the US is 1 and airline pilots (regardless of country) talk to control towers in English.

  • Lumpio- (unregistered) in reply to A Brit

    And if they used the British English versions, the American English speakers would be annoyed. Can't please everyone at the same time.

    Btw, I'm fairly sure "globalization" is also an acceptable spelling in British English - even though it might not be in common use. For example the Oxford English Dictionary gives "globalization" as the primary word, and the spelling with "s" as a variant.

  • m1k4 (unregistered) in reply to me too
    me too:
    WHYST?!
    WYSTF
  • Arfer (unregistered) in reply to A Brit
    A Brit:
    To be honest being British, these americanisms in programming languages are very annoying. I hate having to spell colour for example, the american way without the u. C# is full of them in the System namespace such as changing all the S's to Z's (like in Globalisation)

    And then - when you finally get used to spelling everything the US way, you find libraries that spell it the local way - and it confuses you more...(I've used something, I suspect it was wxWidgets that had Colour (or more accurately wxColour))...

  • Happy American (unregistered) in reply to Fabian

    "Not ENIAC, which was little more than a science project during WWII."

    WOW, REALLY? I see you studied your history through rose colored glasses! :-)

  • Henry Troup (unregistered)

    Back in the days of mainframe editors that took keyword commands, one guy I worked with had an editor profile similar to

    ALIAS UP DOWN ALIAS DOWN UP

    The WTF was that he was the newsletter editor and attempted to publish this as an example of "good" practice.

    I also remember running into

    #define TRUE 0 #define FALSE 1

    once upon a time, where you had to code

    if (varname == TRUE)

    This created hundreds of hard-to-find bugs.

    CAPTCHA: sagaciter - one who write wise footnotes?

  • Anonecromancer (unregistered) in reply to Richeh
    Richeh:
    So is that Charles I as in "Charles the First" then?

    In the future, we refer to him as 'Charles the Frist'

  • (cs) in reply to me too
    me too:
    WHYST?!
    Try "Wherefore?!"
  • Al H. (unregistered)

    One of my favorite things to do in C/C++ is to define "then" as nothing. The looks of colleagues is worth the brief ridicule. Then they ask "how?" and I get to ridicule them :).

  • Matt (unregistered) in reply to A Brit

    Most of the time the Z is not actually an Americanism, that's a fallacy. For example "Globalization" is the correct spelling according to the Oxford English Dictionary. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

  • nikthefix (unregistered) in reply to gabba

    Well he'd have changed that too: #define for regurgitate_forthwith_said_prose_'till_thy_time_doth_expire_upon_a_tally_recorded_of_no_more_than_i-1

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    "embiggoned" reminds me of an old videogame called "Crusaders of might and magic": i found a very-well hidden magical ring called "the Embiggener" that gives your character +10 strength when equipped! that almost doubles your attack power!

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