Boatswain being pronounced “bosun” bothers me more than it probably should.
What about the f in lieutenant?
It’s even worse how they say forecastle.
Or the R in Colonel
Olut or kalja.
NSFW and funny as:
But lots of planets have a North!
What… the… fuck…
Well, now we know another reason why there’s a video called summat like, “Why Are People Leaving DuoLingo in Droves?”
Points for actually using the diacritics denoting the umlaut (no, Uber isn’t a word, no matter how much silicon valley tries to make it one). But it always strikes me that they never ask a native speaker when deciding on the gender of a made-up word. You can’t just choose at random. There are rules, even for artificial words.
In this case “bot” is the governing part of the word, and it’s a contraction of “robot”. “Robot” has a direct German equivalent, “Roboter”, which already carries a grammatical gender (masculine). Therefore any German-speaker would intuitively say that it has to be “der Überbot”, not “das Überbot”.
English never met a diacritic it didn’t think was decorative, and therefore optional.
Risqué cliche.
Don’t even get me started on film and TV scripts…
… anything, really.
