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Jun. 18th, 2004 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleHmm. Looking through some old BBF discussion and I saw this comment by Gyrus (whose LJ handle I forget, sorry):
(For example, I recently read a fic in which something bad happens and Giles tries to tell Buffy that there was no way she could have anticipated it. She replies, "But I should've done!" That just looks weird to a Yank like me.)
I'm sure I'm guilty of using that myself. Why's it wrong? Should it be 'shoulda' instead of should've?
...any other glaring errors any of you have noticed non-Americans making? Because god knows I could go on for pages in obsessive Brit-picking of both Harry Potter fics and Buffy fics set in England (the language thing I get, but some of the cultural stuff, the 'my character's British so they've never heard of ___' : we do have pizzas and action movies and strange flavours of chips/crisps in Britain and Ireland, I promise you)
(For example, I recently read a fic in which something bad happens and Giles tries to tell Buffy that there was no way she could have anticipated it. She replies, "But I should've done!" That just looks weird to a Yank like me.)
I'm sure I'm guilty of using that myself. Why's it wrong? Should it be 'shoulda' instead of should've?
...any other glaring errors any of you have noticed non-Americans making? Because god knows I could go on for pages in obsessive Brit-picking of both Harry Potter fics and Buffy fics set in England (the language thing I get, but some of the cultural stuff, the 'my character's British so they've never heard of ___' : we do have pizzas and action movies and strange flavours of chips/crisps in Britain and Ireland, I promise you)
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on 2004-06-18 09:30 pm (UTC)Plenty of things are regional within the U.S., which make it that much harder to tell you what to use. A prime example is "soda" vs. "pop" vs. the bastard child "soda-pop", vs. even, in some parts of the South, "coke". In other words, if you ask for a Coke, they'll ask what kind, since Coke means (what I call) soda. But in other places soda means soda water, or seltzer. (Warning: do not allow debate of this to occur on your journal, it will never die.)
Another regionalism has to do with the prom. I always said "the prom", as did everyone else around here, but when I went to college I met people who just called it "prom." As in, "I went to prom." But I'm not even sure where people use what, so I'd accept either in fic.
Um... things we don't say... well, Americans don't generally say "I'll ring you" – we'd say "I'll call you." Don't remember if I've seen you use any of these, just thinking aloud.
My brother found a hilarious book about American English which contained English attempts to replicate/transcribe American speech... though I'm sure we do as badly with British English. (I saw a funny bumper sticker – "We're in America. Speak Ebonics.")