There are many dialects of English, both spoken and written. Wouldn't it be a good idea to make efforts to enable everybody who speaks English to be able to converse with every other English speaker in a form that is as neutral as possible?
My idea is not lowest common denominator English but a dialect that everybody can use regardless of their native dialect, a dialect that can be understood by the world, a dialect that uses the best available words regardless of their source and the size of the population who uses it.
Some words are just silly. They have developed and stuck in certain parts of the world because of quirks of history.
For instance in Britain this is called a a telegraph pole. I doubt there are many poles left which actually date from the time when there was a telegraph system and not a telephone system. Today you can't send a telegram in Britain but the things that hold up the wires that carry telephone calls (and many broadband internet links) are called telegraph poles. This is stupid.
A refrigerator is not an icebox. An icebox is a big insulated box filled with ice to keep things cool. They were relatively common for a few decades in the early twentieth century in the USA. Unfortunately the wrong name became transferred to the refrigerator, probably because it seemed easier to pronounce and spell. But it is just simply wrong. The idea that ice could be sold in bags is strange to British people. That distribution system never developed, the British went from natural ice being stored in big buildings lined with straw for the use of the very wealthy and the pedal powered ice cream seller straight to refrigerators complete with small ice making compartments as a consumer durable product in almost a single bound. Strangely almost fifty years after the refrigerator arrived retail sales of big bags of ice began, for parties, barbecues and so on.
When you make a checklist and you check things, and say check, what mark do you make? To an American the answer is obvious, a checkmark. Crazily the British call this a tick. That makes no sense at all. And that's a bad thing, really it is.
When a burglar goes into a house what does he do? In Britain he burgles it. That makes perfect sense. It's a back-formation, as are lots of other words which are now widely seen as perfectly legitimate such as pea, cherry, babysit, typewrite, emote and indeed back-form. In America the ridiculous word burglarize is used. I can understand this as an attempt to score more points in Scrabble but really it is just silly. Stop it.
Quite.
On it's own the word quite as a reply means something very similar to absolutely, or exactly. However the phrase quite nice does not mean the same as absolutely nice. To some Americans apparently it would, which can lead to friction as a phrase meant to be a compliment would sound very faint praise, almost an insult.
What do you call a fizzy non-alcoholic drink of no specific brand or flavour? Most of the words used for this concept are stupid:
soda: from sodium bicarbonate, the very old fashioned way of generating carbon dioxide bubbles in drinks, out of date more than a century ago. It shows how archaic American English is.
coke: a Coca-cola is a Coke. Anything else isn't. Coke is a registered trade mark. It is also overrated in the extreme.
mineral: a kind of a salt, if somebody asks you if you want a mineral ask if they have any magnesium carbonate, with a twist of limestone.
soft drink: soft as opposed to hard? Is alcohol hard?
lemonade: lemonade should be a drink made from lemons, or at the very least made to taste faintly like a drink made with lemons.
juice: juice comes out of fruit, it isn't full of sugar and additives, this word needs protecting from adulteration.
pop: mmmm. I suppose this is the least silly name, it only has the one meaning and it isn't easily confused with something it isn't.
Gas.
It's a liquid so it is stupid to call it gas. Gasoline is reasonable. So is petrol. Petrol is the abbreviation of petroleum spirit, petroleum being oil derived from rocks as opposed to oils derived from animals or plants. But if gasoline is constantly shortened to gas it is less good. Petrol should be the word, it can only be confused with petrel, a seabird, which is much easier to avoid by listening to context but saying gas when you mean gasoline/petrol can be confusing because of usages such as gas tank. Is a gas tank a tank for holding gasoline, a tank for holding compressed gas, a tank under normal pressure but full of a particular gas rather than air or an armoured vehicle that runs on gasoline? I doubt many people will ever imagine a tank full of gregarious cliff-nesting seabirds. The word gas should be reserved for things which are gaseous at the temperatures and pressures you would be happy to sit through in a theatre.
Oh bugger, I can see it now the documentary "the Petrel tank, named after Brigadier Sir Walter Petrel, saw service with the 8th Army in EI-Alamein, it was later replaced by the Sherman tank which while having few if any technical advantages over the Petrel was able to be produced in larger numbers and in a quarter of the time."
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