Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with americanenglish

Help me delete America!

the latin mouse — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:42:59 -0800

No matter what I do, the US-ENGLISH setting on my spellcheck keeps returning from the dead like a bad guy in a horror movie. Is there any way to delete American English permanently and irrevocably from Microsoft Word 2007?

Suggestions I've found via Google which haven't fixed the problem...

Change your language in Control Panel
According to my settings in Control Panel I'm in the UK and speak British English. Word doesn't seem to care.

Go to the Office 07 Language Settings application on the Start Menu and change the default to British English.
I've done this countless times. When I go back, American English has somehow become the default again.

Change your Normal Template.
This only affects docs I create myself from scratch. Most of the docs I work with are being emailed to me by other people.

Start doing a spellcheck and change it from within there. / Change it from Word Options in the ribbon. / Use the little language tab at the bottom of the screen.
This only fixes things for the document I am currently working on. Any subsequent docs I open default back to American English.

Any other ideas? This is seriously eating into my productivity.

Really, really ridiculously goodlooking

Mocata — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 05:16:55 -0800

A questioning concerning Derek Zoolander's pronunciation of the term "good looking"... I've always been amused by the way Zoolander says "goodlooking" (as if it's one word and with a comically heavy stress on "good"). But recently I swear I've heard other people in US media say the phrase with a stress on "good" (rather than with a light stress on "looking" or with an equal stress on both words), in seemingly non-Zoolander-quoting contexts. (I am English.)

Have I been hearing a joke that isn't there for all these years? Do American-English speakers, or a sizeable proportion thereof, say "goodlooking"?

"giving them the Heisman"?

patricio — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:12:51 -0800

In this blog post on Information Arbitrage the author uses the expression "giving them the Heisman". The meaning is pretty clear from the context but I've never come across the expression before. Can anyone shed any light on it? The full paragraph is:
"Yahoo's lame tactics have only been outshone by Microsoft's inexplicable passivity. Microsoft has been holding a straight flush from Day 1, but have acted as if they've got ace high. But even the sleeping giant can be awakened, and it was when they rolled over, looked at the calendar and realized that Yahoo has been giving them the Heisman for two months now. As I said from the beginning, Microsoft shouldn't pay a dime over what is due Yahoo shareholders in the original offer. It is full and fair, and potentially even more so given the uncertain economic environment. They will likely scare Yahoo to the table and prompt Microsoft to offer $1-$2 a share more just to keep the peace and get the deal done."