I’m willing to go for “gay and lesbian” where “queer” is somehow inappropriate. I draw the line at that, and any set of Scrabble tiles masquerading as an acronym representing our diverse communities (LGBTTQQI2S*) is intellectual fraud. T people aren’t gay people, and neither are I or 2S. Sorry. When the deaf become the blind and Canadians become Icelanders, then we’ll talk. (And if you’re several of those things at once, bravo! You’re the exception that alters the rule not one whit.)

My esteemed colleague agrees with me. He put untold hours of effort into the design of a varsity jacket for this, the least exclusive club since the one straight people started up. (And almost as much effort getting WordPress.com to publish his blog entry correctly. It still isn’t 100%.)

Or perhaps you’d just like a crest for your manpurse?

For markup enthusiasts only: LGBT2SQQQBLMORMORSS&SY.

But your typical newspaperman wouldn’t be caught dead on something as girly as a scooter.

Another in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

You’d be surprised how difficult it is to explain why subtitled movies must also be captioned.

• The Brits and Irish cannot even express the concept, as subtitling is called subtitling but captioning is, too. They’re wrong, of course, and have been all along. This isn’t a cute little dialect difference (boot/trunk, elevator/lift) that a descriptive linguist could champion as a fascinating form of language diversity. They’re using the same word for two different things, making them impossible to distinguish. (“I’ve never liked watching subtitles.” Quick: What does that mean?)

  This failure to distinguish two separate things leads to inanities like the Irish broadcast regulator’s claiming that subtitling levels on TV should be increased while limited amounts of captioning could be permitted. Every single bit of it is captioning and it’s what they’ve been watching all along.

• French has only one word for captioning and subtitling, sous-titrage. You can use sous-titrage codé for closed captioning, but doing so limits you to a discussion only of that, not of captioning in general.

• Then of course there’s the bullshit on Wikipedia, but I shall leave that for another day.

How does this apply to CBC? [continue with: Two tracks o’ text →]

It may well appear that a Silver Spirit is parked outside the truck-parts shop on a back alley.

The only way in which looks deceive is that the “alley” is a full-fledged street improbably called Memory Lane. It is now demonstrably possible to go down Memory Lane in one’s Rolls.

(“Do you drive it in the winter?” “My wife does,” said the old man in the hat with the too-broad brim. “Got to use them,” I said. “They can’t be just ornamental.”)

For a while there, the easiest path to a British car was to buy a Honda.

They aren’t bringing them into the country anymore (first it was due to exchange rates, then because they stopped making them). That was to my chagrin, as I adore these brutalist slabs.

The paper by that title by T.K. Pratt (in Focus on Canada, Sandra Clarke [no relation], ed., 1993) combs various sources on U.S., U.K., and Canadian spelling. Pratt concludes that there is little agreement, a statement that is harder to make 13 years later.

Nonetheless, here are all the words Pratt lists whose spelling varies among the countries (not always with one spelling per country). I’m using the first-listed Canadian Oxford spelling in all cases, as life is too short to jot down every variation. (Pratt’s article is an excellent example of how not to typeset anything, including tables, which border on unreadable. This took a lot of futzing.)

• colour, favour, glamour, honour, humour, labour, odour, stupor
• coloration, colourful, favourite, glamorous, honourable, humorous, laborious, labouring
• centre, lustre, macabre, meagre, metre, spectre, theatre, timbre
• defence, licence (n.), license (v.), practice (n.), practise (v.)
• annul, compel, distill, enrol, enrolment, expel, fulfill, install, instalment, signalled, skilful
• benefited, equalled, focused, imperilled, kidnapped, outfitted, signalled
• jewellery (a bugbear of mine: I write jewelry and think “jewellery” is made of “jewellers”), libellous, tranquilize, woollen, worshipper
• advertise, civilize, criticize, realize, surprise
• analyze, paralyze
• acknowledgement, aging, judgment, livable, lovable, movable
• æsthetics, anæsthesia, encyclopedia, medieval
• fetus, manœuvre (but Cf. fibre optic, fibreglass)
• appendices, bureau, chateaux, formulæ, indexes or indices (latter given first for “technical use”), referendums, tableaux
• æroplane, analog (!), axe, catalogue, cheque, cigarette, connection, curb, dialogue, disc, draft or draught (depending on sense), grey, gypsy, inflection, mould (mold listed as variant), omelette, plow, program, pyjamas, snowplow, storey (building), toward (not towards)

Try to determine on which plane each of these visible objects is located.