Likewise, but the fact that a very senior bod in the education heirachy "doesn't care" that varying schools across the province are teaching it differently leaves me speechless.

Well not really but you get the gist

Should be the "awardested" truck in Canada

Maybe the Canadian schools got a job lot of septic books on the cheap and the teachers just got tired of explaining it.

As for spelling bees, they are a weird concept, not as bad as little miss pageants, but kind of freaky none the less. What do the kids get for winning it - is it worth it?

The senior bod has more important things to worry about, the kids will be fine and will be able to tell that color/colour is the same thing like you and I.

but you and I aren't the same thing.

Edit: that's f'kin terrible, god i'm bored.

You must be - go to bed!!!!!

Well I don't think he's going to have too much success if he "doesn't care" about the fundamentals.

I agree that on the grand scale it isn't important - but when you get someone in his position saying that, just seems like a bit of a gaff because it implies that he may not care about other stuff

My first job when i got there was proof reading at the North Shore News. I corrected the spelling of Caulfeild in North Van before it was explained to me it is Caulfeild and not Caulfield. Thats just wrong!

When I see mm/dd/yyyy written down, that is a sure sign we are dealing with a 'merican.

One thing that bugs me is that the city I live in recently bought signs pointing to the leisure centre....however, it was spelt 'leisure center'. I pointed this out to my local Councillor (not the reason for the discussion) and her reply was that the signs were from the US and that most Canadians didn't see the problem.

The malaise is quite prevalent. Younger people don't seem to notice the difference in the spellings.

I agree. I spend (far too) much of my working day "translating" material from US, European, Indian and Australasian English into usable material for the Canadian marketplace. The spelling is neither here nor there - few people will even notice, let alone care, about the presence or absence of a u or two or the prevalence of z over s in -ize/-ise words. I do care, but my colleagues will confirm that I get tediously pedantic on the subject.

The mangling of language - too often by supposedly literate journalists and copywriters - is much more annoying to me. Back-formation of verbs from nouns which are already formed from verbs is a particular bugbear: my absolute pet hate is "burglarized" (or "burglarised" if you prefer) - when there is already a perfectly good and much simpler word - burgle - from the same root. I think at least half the problem stems from people's fear that simple language will make them seem less intelligent. Throughout the school system (and Canada is no different from anywhere else in the English-speaking world) too much emphasis is placed on freedom of expression at the expense of clarity of thought.

And (forgiving the commencement of a paragraph with a conjunction - I'm being colloquial...) the encroachment of adjectives into the territory properly occupied by adverbs grates somewhat. "He did good" should be "he did well"; getting that right might discourage further aberrations such as "he did awesome."

Hear, hear! Another one.... why use a clumsy made-up word like "obligated" when "obliged" is simpler and indeed, 'eleganter'?

And there's an other advert for some soap powder/liquid ... It apparently cleans "way more better than the other guy."

I often have no idea what the correct grammatical term for the offence is, but that one drives me nuts too! Daughter Number Two comes out with this expression and aghhhhh - I done well, I done good, she done it - agghhhh. My constant corrections bleat on as a background noise to her now, I am sure.

Exactly. Although it could almost be excused if there was a comma between 'more' and 'better' - if it was supposed to mean: "one packet of our soap cleans a significantly greater quantity of stuff, and it cleans it more effectively, than our competitors' product."

The 'he done good' really grates with me as well...ditto goes for people say things such as 'Me and Jim' etc instead of 'Jim and I'.

Along those lines, but going off on a sort of tangent is when people mish mash metric and imperial terms.

i.e The car gets 15 mpg when you cruise at 80 km/h
We got 10 inches of snow last night and the temperature was -20 c


Stick with one system or the other