kodokan

Is that a real word? I've seen it, but assumed it was just lazy textspeak, or one of those irritating phoneticisms, like 'lite' or 'kwik'.

Pulaski

Fix the quotes, people!

Lizzyq: use the desktop site on your "mobile platform". It works just fine, and I have used the desk top site on my phone for 99.9% of my last 22,000+ posts.

Wintersong

I'm fairly confident that I've always used meter for a measuring instrument, but I've been here so long that I'm no longer 100% sure.

kimilseung

Americans would just get so confused about what a Manchester Guardian was. They would think it was a quaint phrase for a defender at United.

robin1234

I now see that I screwed up a quote earlier in this thread. What I've been seeing recently is delayed and erratic response from BE, sometimes causing the cursor to be placed in the quoted part of the message (thus corrupting the quote coding, if I don't notice it, and causing the quote to appear as regular text.) I usually try to fix errors in posts before posting, but missed that one..!

I use an iPad mini, which has a fairly large screen so I use the desktop site for everything... including my bank that for some reason tries to force me into their mobile site every time I go there ...

lizzyq

I'm on particularly slow internet at the moment, and my tablet does some odd things with the desktop version. Back to decent 'net and my desktop PC mid-week, if the gods of laboratory instruments are on my side.

yellowroom

ahh, thank you. I hadn't realised this and I think I really hacked off a colleague when editing their contribution to a technical document recently. They had used "insure" throughout where a Brit would have used "ensure".

Does the British use of "ensure" cause confusion in the US or is it generally understood?

robin1234

How about inclosure and enclosure? This isn't an American vs. British issue. When enclosure was a live political issue, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was spelled (or spelt) "inclosure." As in Inclosure Acts in parliament. I think it's now always spelled "enclosure."

I'm wondering if this parallels the ensure/insure thing somehow.

Pulaski

Maybe. It seems closer to enquire/inquire.
I think it is widely understood, just not as widely used.

At least if people comment and ask, or look it up, they might realise that nobody is paying a cash premium and receiving money back if something goes tits-up, but that someone is working to, er, ensure that doesn't happen. Of course they might just dismiss it as a quirky British spelling variation.

Rete

As an American, I'm quite familiar with the words insure and ensure and know their proper usage. However, I have never encountered the word 'inclosure'. Will now what to look it up for its meaning.

Oakvillian

To be fair to Humphrey Davy, his first go at the word in 1807 was "alumium" without the extra "in" in the middle. Then when he wasn't happy with how that rolled off the tongue he went for "aluminum," but by 1812 had settled on "aluminium," to echo the formation of many other metal element names (chromium, potassium, sodium, magnesium, etc., several of which Davy had isolated, identified, or given English names... potassium and sodium are elsewhere known as kalium and natrium, hence the chemical symbols K and Na).

By the time Noah Webster published his dictionary in 1828 most of the world (including scientists in America) had settled on aluminium, and ignored the idiosyncratic Webster and his spelling crusade. Unfortunately, when aluminium became much more widely known and used - when large scale refining became possible in the late 19th and early 20th century with the development of hydroelectric power - newspaper editors referred to Webster for the spelling and aluminum became more common in American popular writing. IUPAC, which is the arbiter of chemical naming disputes, is clear that the correct spelling is "aluminium," and scientific papers even in American journals will usually use the IUPAC spellings for chemical elements.

Yet another unnecessary Americanization that can be blamed on Webster - though he is not responsible for the -ize vs -ise conventions where (it grieves me to acknowledge) the Brits are largely in the wrong.

Pulaski

But the spelling of aluminum is consistent with, off the top of my head, platinum, stanum (tin), and plumbum (lead), so consistency of naming isn't possible either way.

Oakvillian

There are 73 metallic elements in the Periodic Table with English names ending in -ium; there are four (molybdenum, tantalum, platinum, lanthanum) in -um. Stannum and plumbum are not English chemical names - otherwise you might as well also add in aurum, argentum, cuprum, and a handful of other red herrings.

There is one established convention - that has been a convention since the late 18th century - of naming newly isolated chemical elements. And that is to use an -ium ending for the name. Noah Webster be damned.

Novocastrian

Only the last of those three is a truly red herring.

Oakvillian