[TAG] English->American dictionary

Tue Oct 11 02:50:21 MSD 2005

Predrag Ivanovic wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 08:38:05 +0100
> "Jimmy O'Regan" <jimregan at o2.ie> wrote:

[snip]

>>>Great book,that.A friend of mine has it in English(I bought
>>>translated one),but he is somewhat reluctant to share it.Now,I need
>>>to brake his legs^W^Wpersuade him to borrow it...
>>
>>English homonyms claim another victim! ("Break")
> 
> 
> I hate when I do that...
> Thanks for pointing it out. 

> 
>>I was helping my son with his homework during the week, and had to 
>>examine his spelling. The first word in the list was "there". Those 
>>bastards!
> 
> 
> Heh.I use Aspell for that,and I wonder if it checks spelling by  British or American
> spelling rules (they are different to a degree,right?). 

/me checks Subject line

Yeah!

Really, the set of differences is pretty small, neither makes much more 
sense than the other, and neither is any more consistent.

> 
>>A friend of mine started writing fiction and poetry a year ago, and 
>>enlisted my help as a proofreader. Aside from a few odd ideas about 
>>punctuation, his only recurring problem was mixing up "there",
>>"their", and "they're".
> 
> 
> "Look there,they're using their brake to break the car."
> Yes,that's easy.As in "This is Unix.I know this." from 'Jurassic park'.  

That's it :)

> 
> 
>>>BTW,what do you think of Gaiman/Pratchett book "Good omens"?
>>
>>I liked it. I think I may need to read it again: it seems the American
>>and British versions are quite different.
> 
> 
> What?There are two versions?How do I know which I have?
> What could possibly be the difference?Not that I have anything against
> reading it twice <g>.

Well, APF explains it (thanks Rick!).

> 
> 
>>>I've read few pages of it,but then got "The art of deception" by
>>>Kevin MItnick,so "Good omens" will have to wait.SO many books to
>>>read,so little time... 
>>
>>I know the feeling.
>>
>>Ooh! Lifehack! Project Gutenberg now offer HTML versions of most of 
>>their new etexts, but for older texts I pipe them through this 2
>>liner:
>>
>>``
>>perl -ne 'BEGIN{print "<html><body><pre>";$i=1;}print "<a href=\"#$i
>>\" \ name=\"$i\">$i</a> $_";$i++;END{print "</pre></body></html>";}'
>>''
>>
>>so I can use bookmarks when reading.
> 
> 
> Reading a book on computer screen...it just doesn't feel right.

That'll be the eyestrain :)

> But,many books I can't find(or can not afford)in a dead tree version,so I adapt to new times.

Plus, you can't use grep on paper.

> Thanks for the perl snippet,it'll come handy.
> Google and Yahoo also have plans for on-line library,or so I've heard.
> That would be cool.

Google's version... well, it looks interesting, I suppose. You can 
already get something similar for several titles at amazon.com

Yahoo's version... I hope to heck they're not going to just repeat 
everything that's been done by Project Gutenberg.

You do know about Distributed Proofreaders (http://pgdp.net) and DP EU 
(http://dp.rastko.net), right?