Saint George’s Day
Saint George is the patron saint of England, Georgia [the country], Bulgaria, Portugal, Catalonia, and the city of Moscow. Orthodox countries tend to celebrate George on November 23rd.
PETA condemns George for his senseless slaughter of dragons. The YWCA condemns the condemnation and wants to know when PETA is going to volunteer to be DragonChow™
It is UNESCO’s International Day of the Book.
It is also the birth and death day of Billy the Bard, who was a great writer in desperate need of a spelling checker.
Master Shakespeare gave all of the best lines to villains supplying low humor to those who have read the Folio, e.g. the late Senator Arlen Specter quoting Iago, reputedly in support of Clarence Thomas.
9 comments
My kudos for your use of the term “spelling checker”. The term “spell checker” always makes me grit my teeth. Harry Potter or Sabrina the Teenage Witch need a “spell” checker. The rest of us have trouble with our spelling, not our spells.
– Badtux the Obnoxiously Pedantic Penguin
It was a change brought about by your complaints, Badtux 😈
Sadly, witches and warlocks everywhere are still disappointed when they go online to find a checker for their spells, and instead only find software that corrects the spelling of their spells — rarely what they were interested in ;). But we persist in being obnoxiously pedantic, one vendor at a time. Some day, some day, witches and warlocks will be able to use Google to find a checker for their spells rather than just page after page of spelling checkers… and then? Cthulhu? Oh wait, Cthulhu already went back asleep because we’re doing his job better than he could. Alrighty then!
“… in desperate need of a spelling checker.”
As am I, a not-so-great writer, but in need nonetheless. Does anyone know a substitute for the Mozilla-listed US English spellING-checker? The one they link must have been constructed by someone for whom English, or at least American English, was a third or fourth language; it constantly feeds me UK spellings. I’m not the only one who complains; read the comments on Mozilla’s spellING-checker page.
In at least one item of Harry Potter fan-fic, Harry is working a really boring part-time job as a “spell checker.” Me, I’m just not picky enough to append the ING in the more conventional usage.
Who knew that penguins felt the pain of witches and warlocks 😉
There has to be something in about:config that would explain that behavior, Steve, because I don’t have the problem with my install of Ubuntu 12.04 and Firefox 20.0. It could be something as weird as the default language for displaying pages which kicks it in.
I investigated a bit more, because this has been a problem for me from about Firefox 17 through Firefox 20 on Ubuntu 12.04. The oddity turned out to be as follows: a newly installed Firefox had a US English spelling dictionary installed under Dictionaries, but about:config insists that the proper spelling checker (I can’t get used to that term) is en_UK or en_GB (I’ve seen each of those in different recent versions of Firefox). Changing this to en_US seems to solve much of the problem.
The about:config stores the defaults loaded every time you open Firefox. If you don’t change that, the program switches back.
I am fairly sure that when I downloaded/installed U-12.04 there was a language option and that seems to have taken care of the problem for me. Because it is a UK company I think it defaults to UK English for everything.
Shouldn’t UK English be simply called “English”, since, well, it’s English English as in the people who invented the language? In a sense when you selected “English” as your language for Ubuntu you got what you asked for ;).
There are academic linguists who claim that the English of the middle Appalachians is the real English, as spoken by Shakespeare, while all of the others are corrupted by ‘foreign influences’.