Last week I had to give my first presentation for a seminar in Ontologies. I worked quite a bit on it (since I really didn’t want to give something boring), but more importantly, I wanted to be able to write on my slides words like ‘modeling’, ‘labeling’, and ‘losing’ in order to point out to the Germans the wrong spellings of ‘modelling’, ‘labelling’, and worst of all, ‘loosing’. Now before I get flamed for this in the comments, just take a look at the proper spellings and see how much more elegant they are, truly.
For some reason, I can’t help but cringe when I see things like that on slides. I know I should be more understanding of non-native speakers, but it’s hard when their English is generally so good that I am already easily fooled. Some of the more memorable typos?
-[name removed to protect the unaware] well-formed linguists and lap sessions
-[name removed to protect the innocent] birectional and boostrapping (the last one sounds like a norwegian term for catching the bus..)
Bringing the ontology seminar and typical mistakes in English together once again: It was really embarrassing (but funny nevertheless) how one guy kept saying “become” instead of “get” (“bekommen” in German) all through his presentation.
‘If you enter this query, you’ll become a list of strings’ sounds rather frightening, but it is rather common in Germany. 😉
It feels strange to say it, because I am no native speaker. But in the context of modeling/modelling etc., “wrong” seems inappropriate.
As one can read in the Wiktionary entry for model, modelling vs. modeling is a british vs. american english thing. If you compare the number of google results for the two variants, you get the same idea.
Yes, I am aware of the unfortunate inadequacies of the British language. Which is why I pointed out that one should look at the elegant spellings I put forth before flaming 😛