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On their website they have a story about a motorcyclist who was jailed. Included in it is:

were thrown from the bike, landing three meters away

Unless they measure using gas or electricity meters.

PaulT wrote:On their website they have a story about a motorcyclist who was jailed. Included in it is:

were thrown from the bike, landing three meters away

Unless they measure using gas or electricity meters.

I think you'll find that if it was the Americans, it would have read

"were thrown from the bike, landing 9 feet 10 7⁄64 inches away"

Nice one Dave

I did make a complaint and received this reply:

Hi Paul
Thank you for your email. Apologies for the slip, I have reminded all press officers of the correct English version of the spelling.

Regards

A slight tie in with Paul (Raistlin) post - not being educated as to how words are spelt and their meanings

Yes, but why aren't they using yards?!

I had a moan recently, writing to a TV company who'd made a documentary about a heavy haulage company based in Bristol. It was an UK made documentary, about a UK company working solely in the UK, yet they used kilometres to describe the journey lengths! OK, my comment above is perhaps unfounded as we do tend to use metric extensively now, but as far as this TV show was concerned, I stand by my guns, as we don't on the roads!

Not sure who they were aiming it at? If it was for a European country, then fair enough to use kilometres, but wouldn't it have been in, say, French or German? If it was for the US, then they use miles! Australia perhaps? But then, even in English speaking countries, they usually change the voiceover, so why not let them change the miles to kilometres?!

The UK adopted the S.I. system of measurements. From a personal point of view I found it far easier carrying out calculations using the S.I. units.

Next time you drive down a UK motorway look at the 'mile' markers. They are not they are kilometre markers. Look at your speedo and by EU regulations UK market speedos have to show both imperial and metric measurements for speed. Think there may have been a battle by one of the UK Governaments to keep miles.

BUT my pet hate is UK English words being spelt the US English way - an even greater hate is email providers such as GMail showing as incorrect my UK English - do the yanks not realise that certain things they do rub up countries the wrong way hence their disbelief that anyone would want to harm them in 2001.

Can't disagree with the US spellings being forced on us! I don't like it, for example, when Gill cancels an event in our shared diary in Outlook, and it reports it as being "canceled" - and there's no way to change it to "cancelled"

(and ironically, I use "iSpell" as a checker on IE, and thus it's looking at what I type now. It liked "canceled" but not has underlined "cancelled" in red! Grrr!)

Anything that changes my spelling, or attempts to tell me either I am wrong or mistaken in the written word, is my pet hate. I worked damned hard over a considerable period to reach a standard in English Language that was acceptable to my learned tutors, the main one being Owen LLewellyn Evans (whose origins will be obvious and even that venerable man's middle name is not recognised in modern checkers.). His occasional lapse into verbal violence in his native tongue was most impressive and most of us were glad it remained indecipherable. To this day.

I will resist being prompted by a faceless robot that has been programmed (spelled properly) by a spotty youth straight from MIT or Harvard. I regard such intrusions into English English as an attempt to Radicalise me. And we all know where that leads (my apologies for beginning a sentence (sentence?) with 'and'. Not, of course, that I am in any way paranoiac or anti-US.

I'd like to point out that I am pretty good at spelling, but I do use the spellchecker (which as always, is a word rejected by itself!) as I'm not as accurate with the typing!

Accuracy is a problem, but I usually blame fat finger syndrome. I've tried the left-handedness Sicilian Defence but even I don't understand that. Best to deny everything and pretend that my apology didn't happen because I was on holiday when the eagle eyed corrector posted the scandalous allegation.