For a real mental headache try talking to a Scotsman. I knew a fellow in Teheran from the Scottish highlands. He had such a terrible burr it actually made my head hurt to try to understand a conversation with him.

All of you could solve this slang problem
if only you learned the perfect English,
Canadian eh.

The Italian language was unified by TV quiz shows like "Lascia o raddoppia" by Mike Bongiorno, an American citizen. Dialects are disappearing. The Milanese dialect is only spoken in Canton Ticino, Switzerland. I am a Triestino and I spoke my dialect with my wife, but my sons, born in Milano, only speak Italian.My grandosons, born in Tuscany, speak the Tuscan dialect, which is the Italian language grace to Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio. The main difference is that "father" is not "papa'" but "babbo".
Tullio

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How about the old joke on how Canada was named ??

pogey

What is this word?

Lively discussions you let me a word in edgeways, ha ha. You opened my eyes.

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Be able to endure loneliness, will be very close to success, wealth and career will be away from us, but thought eternal.

Be careful about Canada. See this "Nature" article:
D-wave 2
I cooperated with these people on AQUA@home.
Tullio

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The story about "Canada" being derived from "Kanata" is generally accepted by historians today, but there is another theory. Seems that after old Jacques had annoyed the locals long enough they pointed upstream and said something else, that roughly translates as "go away".

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I know it as "Welfare".

All Canadians know that we take the mickey, but it is all in good natured fun, and they know that :-)

We enjoy the friendship.

I know it as "Welfare".

All Canadians know that we take the mickey, but it is all in good natured fun, and they know that :-)

We enjoy the friendship.

The kids today call it pogey. I always thought they stole that off some Brit-com on CBC. It sounds vaguely dirty, which made me think it was Brit.

A certain portion of my family calls it "treaty money".

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We used to know it as Dole money. In the UK, Unemployment Benefit has been known by the slang term 'the dole' since WWI. This derives from the 'doling out', i.e. 'handing out' of charitable gifts of food or money. These days it's called Job Seekers Allowance.

"After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics, it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday."

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

There is one thing English that America has clung to that even the English have caved in on. The English imperial system of measurement. Someone has been trying to switch us to the metric system for a long time now but most of us still think in feet and inches, quarts and gallons and fahrenheit measure of temperature over celsius.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Yes, but nautical miles have two definitions, one British and one American. They are used in aviation as knots (nautical miles/hour) but which one?
Tullio

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The English imperial system of measurement.

Bob,

We had three wonderful British systems at one time .

We still live pretty much by the British Engineering System here in the United States. Quarts, pounds, slugs, feet etc.

The imperial System gave us the imperial gallon and the glorious Imperial quart of 40 ounces and the Proper Pint of ale at a bladder busting 20 ounces. In the good old days you could still buy an Imperial quart of various spirits. These would last much longer than the 25.3 ounces in the so called "fifth" of whiskey.

I remember shopping at my father's Navy Booze store in the Bahamas or at the Duty free shop in Toronto for these really good deals. A 40 ounce Beefeaters or Cutty Sark was $3.25 on the Andros AUTEC Navy base in the Bahamas.

The British also had the Whitworth system for wrenches, threads and nuts. A bicycle repairman might have had these tools in the past.

Now we are stuck with the communist Metric system. It makes computations simpler in Physics but if we don't teach both systems to our physics students here in America they won't get a good sense of what we are talking about in class.

Yes, but nautical miles have two definitions, one British and one American. They are used in aviation as knots (nautical miles/hour) but which one?
Tullio

I'm pretty sure the distance used for the nautical mile was 6080 ft. Or at least it was until the metric system was developed. It made sense as it was an approximation of one minute of latitude at the equator. As I have now read it is defined as 1852 meters which is 6,076 ft.

One of the Mars landers crashed because a critical portion of the landing program was calculated in english units while the rest of the units were metric. The metric system was developed by French scientists at the request of Napoleon and I don't think Napoleon was a communist. As part of his conquest of europe he wanted a standardized system of measurement.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

American measurements, like the American language and spelling, are a mix of British units and new units made up just to be different.

"Communist" seems to be an American code word for "stuff I don't like".

"Knot" as used in aviation is actually an SI unit - it is metric by definition. The SI definition of a knot is 1.150779 miles per hour. Roughly 6,076.115 feet per hour.

People forget how mixed up the world was before metric came along. Every European country had its own definition of a foot and a pound, and they were all slightly different. At least introducing metric boiled this mess down to two very different numbers - Emperial and Metric.

For example, the English press a few centuries ago made great fun of Napoleon for being short - only 5 foot 3. This myth has stuck around to today. In fact, Napoleon was 5 FRENCH feet and 3 FRENCH inches tall, or about 5 foot 9 in modern Emperial and US units. That was pretty average for the day.

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A mile, however defined, statute or Admiralty, is not a a SI unit and so a knot cannot be a SI unit. But I can understand the problem of aviation going metric. When in WWII, a part of Italian Air force was given Allied planes after the armistice, a number of accidents ensued. Pilots trained in the metric system had problems in converting to the Imperial system. I wonder how the two systems can coexist on the ISS.
Tullio

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I wonder how the two systems can coexist on the ISS.

I bet they use metric.

All I know is that Orbital Sciences Corporation uses metric units in its spacecrafts, which have connected to the ISS.
Tullio

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One of the Mars landers crashed because a critical portion of the landing program was calculated in english units while the rest of the units were metric.

Didn't the Hubble telescope have a similar problem?

Gruß,
Gundolf