areas

OK, not being English, but Welsh and detesting football with all it's attendant religious fanaticism, can I ask that the reg use square metres, cubic millimetres and so forth and dispense with bus volumes, football pitches etc.

Leave that to the tabloid press, who assume their readership is too stupid to perceive areas in their actual terms.

As for the use of English, I have no problem with you people out there in the US having your own version of English and it pisses me off no end to have it pushed onto us as the norm.

I don't care how pedantic it may seem, or how much easier it is, if you want a standardised form of English, you change your version to ours. If you don't like the idea, you will get the drift of my argument.

English != British

Bah, they do south of the border. The Welsh get to be Welsh and British, similarly the Scots. But the dominate group (the English) went on to define British .. so there .. na na na na na .... Childish argument anyway. Next you will be spouting on about the non-existent West Lothian problem. yawn yawn. Compaining about EU regulation and demanding your pipe and slippers before your afternoon nap.

@MikeC - err no, everywhere in the world apart from the US its football. So football is the correct term. Your assumptions are incorrect. Ireland is essentially irrelevant in this context, and you can call it what you like there. But a rag with an international outlook needs to use the right internationally recognised terminology. Its simply a matter of numbers .. Now let teddy get back in the pram nicely !

like the rest of your post though : )

How jingoistic the English are.

The correct term is soccer, unless you live in England, in whioch case football obviously applies. However, if you run a website with an international readership, you can either use soccer to avoid confusion, or use football, and not whinge when people point out how misleading that term is.

To the poster who states "Cry God for Harry, England/Ireland/Scotland/Wales", in Ireland (north and Republic), as with all the many other countries listed earlier, football is most often referring to Gaelic football, unless you're not a fan. If there's ocnfusion, you refer to soccer, or to 'english football' to calrify. Soccer is very popular in Ireland, we just don't feel the need to assume everyone else will refer to football meaning Gaelic football!

To Nik, who clearly feels that the word soccer represents a wave of immigration destroying all that he holds up as English, as well as Evil Europe telling him what to do, I say this:

Countries change. People sometimes fear change. Soemtimes they cast around, and blame immigrants or foreign nations and groups, rather than accept that capitalism and techology will always foster change, and sweating about people using international English (despite American usage, it IS international) instead of looking at what the problems really are. I'm amazed you accpeted decimalisation, or do you still have bags og shillings and guineas?

The changes in your society are more than multiculturalism, they're the result of policies implemented by your own government, at national level. Blaming the wider framework of the EU is an easy cop-out, as Daily Mail reading jingoistic reactionaries will see it as a single source of evil, absolving greed, follishness or well-intentioned mistakes made at national level. The more jingoistic a natyion - and both the US and UK are serial offenders - the easier it is to create a sense of external threat on which the hang the blame for things thta people don't like, but the government will do anyway - sometimes the wrong things, and sometimes right, but some people will still fear change regardless.

Like Nik.

MikeC