Dear Apple
February 26th, 2009Dear Apple Computer,
congratulations on the hard work you have put in to producing your greenest mac ever, I bet it was really hard work.
However, I must let you know about a few oversights on your part.
1) Outside of North America, in the rest of the civilised world, people who say “aloominum” are douchebags, regardless of officialities. Don’t be a douchebag. It’s spelled aluminium, you can pronounce it “al-oo-min-ee-um”. Want to impress those of us who loathe Windows constantly defaulting to EN-US as the language? Don’t discard the obvious syllable. Or at the very least, get a localised dubover.
It’s bad enough that we have kids these days calling Jam “jelly”, and Biscuits “cookies”, and the letter Zed “zee”. Insulting us (especially commonwealtheans) further does not make you sales.
2) Make the ability to give such feedback directly possible on your website, plzkthx.
3) I look forward to buying a mac tablet. Hurry up with that, and make sure it’s made of aluminium, not aluminum.
Hugs and kisses.
Me.
March 18th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Am writing this from Pittsburgh USA, so kinda appropriate to add my two cents on Americanisation/Americanization of English. I used to feel the same way about aluminium, until I read the background to the naming – much more to this than meets the eye:
“Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812″
Full story here: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminiu...
March 30th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Sounds like the American way – fork it and stick with it. American English is essentially an evolved version of 1700’s English
Same dice with Metric – they agreed to it in the 70’s yet they still talk in miles and pounds.
What are you in Pittsburgh for?