United Kingdom
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
view the rest of the comments
Huh. It's The Register, which is a British piece of media, with a London-based author writing about an event in the UK and they're using the traditionally-American English spelling. Maybe the UK is going towards "fiber" rather than "fibre".
hits Google N-grams
Ah hah. Yup, apparently it's at about 50-50, but the majority in British English just switched to "fiber" within the last ten years.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fiber%2Cfibre&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-GB-2019&smoothing=3
There’s a few things going on here, in addition to a general Americanisation.
Firstly El Reg obviously wants to attract those sweet sweet American clicks, so they could well have American English as their style guide (I’m a bit doubtful, I bet they use colour).
Secondly there’s long been a tendency to use American spelling in IT journalism for technical objects. So “optical fiber” but “dietary fibre”; “floppy disk”, but djs “spin discs”. “TV programme”, but “computer program”.
It’s been that ways since at least the 80s, quite possibly earlier.
goes to investigate
Google search for: site:theregister.com color:
Google search for: site:theregister.com colour:
You appear to be correct.
Interestingly, quite a few of the 'colors' are from articles written by US editors/correspondents - so it looks like the Reg doesn't havw a consistency-obsessed subs desk and will let the journalist go with whatever they are most comfortable with.
Quite a few of the others are forum comments.
Disk vs disc I believe is down to the type of medium, magnetic disk vs optical disc
It's the best characteristic of English, I think. It's alive, it changes and we do very little to prevent that from happening (unlike French or German).
You do so little that the spelling and phonetics of words have been drifting apart for couple centuries and nobody cares. Then people who only speak English think every language is as a Frankenstein monster as much as English.
Like all reasonable people interested in linguistics, I'm a descriptivist. However, something about the idea of language being adapted to cater to an algorithm turns my stomach.
I know it's hypocritical. The Attention Economy shouldn't be any less valid a linguistic influence than the Norman Conquests, just because they occurred a millennium ago.
I genuinely think we're lucky in Britain that the soft power we have (for the time being) has prevented our culture being entirely supplanted by the United States.