http://www.englishforums.com/search/pro.htm?q=tag%3aFootball+tag%3aPronunciation+tag%3aNounsSearch results for 'tag:Football tag:Pronunciation tag:Nouns' matching tags 'Football', 'Pronunciation', and 'Nouns'en-USCSMOD (Build: 3273.32735)http://www.englishforums.com/English/MessageFromJohnCleese/gjzgp/post.htm#546905Sun, 27 Jul 2008 07:57:03 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:546905anonymousThe response from the United States of America to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth IIMessage from Her Majesty the Queen Let us start with your header the use of Majesty Here is how it is derived After the fall of Rome Majesty was used to describe a Monarch of the very highest rank indeed it was generally applied to God The title was then also assumed by Monarchs of great powers as an attempt at self praise and despite a supposed lower royal style as a King or Queen who would thus often be called His or Her Royal Majesty The first English king to be styled Majesty was Henry VIII We can t stand people that think of themselves as Gods And technically it would be Goddess in this case Goddess have you even seen a picture of your queen To the citizens of the United States of America from Her Sovereign MajestyQueen Elizabeth IIIn light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidatesfor President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves we hereby givenotice of the revocation of your independence effective immediately Yes we sure do elect some bad presidents but that is what you get when you stop inbreeding the Royal blood line and end up with nit wits like your son We like to see change occur every once in awhile It is expected that we will elect a bad one every now and again but we will just elect another president You on the other hand are stuck with your nit wits Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical dutiesover all states commonwealths and territories except Kansas which shedoes not fancy Monarchial duties What is that What does she do exactly Oh I forgot Nothing So we will gladly let her do her duties We just won t pay her unless she does something useful And it figures that she would not want Kansas that is where a lot of strong pioneering women come from in our history Pioneering implies that she must do something Your new Prime Minister Gordon Brown will appoint a Governor for Americawithout the need for further elections Congress and the Senate will be disbanded A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of younoticed Wow you are a deluded country If you have not noticed The People rule here Congress and the Senate just try to keep us happy so they can keep their jobs And as for the questionnaire if we are happy we will not notice If we are not happy and we do not have the congress or senate to blame You Will Notice To aid in the transition to a British Crown dependency the following rulesare introduced with immediate effect You should look up revocation in the Oxford English Dictionary So you think that our authority was conferred to us by you You gave us the rite to be the United States of America You should pick up a history book WE TOOK IT We will let you know when we want to GIVE it back Unless you think you can take it back LOL Like that would be possible You can t defend yourselves let alone attack anybody It might behoove you to remember The only freedoms you have are the freedoms you can defend We re Good How about you 1 Then look up aluminium and check the pronunciation guide You will beamazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it noun adjective Chiefly British We are Not British 2 The letter U will be reinstated in words such as colour favour labour and neighbour Likewise you will learn to spell doughnut without skipping half the letters and the suffix ize will be replacedby the suffix ise Generally you will be expected to raise yourvocabulary to acceptable levels look up vocabulary OK You are starting to sound like the French Do you really want to be associated with the French 3 Using the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises suchas like and you know is an unacceptable and inefficient form ofcommunication There is no such thing as US English We will let know on your behalf The spell checker will be adjusted to takeinto account the reinstated letter u and the elimination of ize You still using Microsoft we moved on to Apple Linux etc And using like and you know is extremely efficient to educated people For example The British are becoming like the French And that implies You know See rather than write paragraphs the thought was expressed in a simple statement 4 July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday What is it to embarrassing for you I think we will keep it unless you can take it LOL5 You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns lawyers ortherapists The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists showsthat you re not quite ready to be independent Guns should only be usedforshooting grouse If you can t sort things out without suing someone orspeaking to a therapist then you re not ready to shoot grouse Nice try but we can still kick your butts without the guns They call our lawyers sharks for a reason They eat their prey go ahead take them on Our therapists make them feel better after kicking your butts And as far as only shooting grouse If you didn t already kill every other animal in the forests that you no longer have you might actually be able to go hunting When is the last time you saw a deer in the woods in your country 6 Therefore you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything moredangerous than a vegetable peeler Although a permit will be required if youwish to carry a vegetable peeler in public A vegetable peeler will be just fine By the way do you grow potatoes carrots or anything that requires a vegetable peeler Didn t think so you have to farm for that And that is just so beneath you Just keep buying our food 7 All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts and you will startdriving on the left side with immediate effect At the same time you willgo metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversiontables Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British senseof humour Oh my God Majesty you are using that to better us No wonder you lost your kingdom Oh we have a horse if you want to sell your kingdom We might even give you two horses And we understand the British sense of humor To laugh you must smile to smile you must have nice Teeth You Know 8 The former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol which you have beencalling gasoline of roughly 10 US gallon Get used to it Jealous Remember that whole No taxation without representation thing You should look into it 9 You will learn to make real chips Those things you call French friesare not real chips and those things you insist on calling potato chipsareproperly called crisps Real chips are thick cut fried in animal fat anddressed not with catsup but with vinegar For someone who used to have India you think that you might have learned something about spices All you got out of that era was vinegar Come on go through the Chunnel to France and start learning how to cook If we take any criticism about our food it will have to come from France 10 The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actuallybeer at all Henceforth only proper British Bitter will be referred to asbeer and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referredto as Lager South African beer is also acceptable as they are pound forpound the greatest sporting nation on earth and it can only be due to thebeer They are also part of the British Commonwealth see what it did forthem American brands will be referred to as Near Frozen Gnat s Urine so thatall can be sold without risk of further confusion Ok Our beer sucks but if we are going to take criticism about it Germany will have to do it 11 Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as goodguys Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play Englishcharacters Watching Andie MacDowell attempt English dialogue in FourWeddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one s ears removedwith a cheese grater Stick to Documentaries your country is incapable of producing entertainment movies You don t laugh you don t cry you don t feel and you think that you can entertain a populace It would be akin to watching black and white silent movies Again go to France India Germany even Japan But in the end I think it would be best if you just make Documentaries 12 You will cease playing American football There is only one kind ofproper football you call it soccer Those of you brave enough will intime be allowed to play rugby which has some similarities to Americanfootball but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds orwearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies Don t try rugby the South Africans and Kiwis will thrash you like they regularly thrash us You just don t get entertainment Yep we Americans are going to go nuts over watching guys in shorts run around the field for 3 hours and maybe make a score There might even be an upset match of 2 1 The excitement of it all has me watering at the mouth And when we are done being thrilled by the game we can switch the channel to watch a bunch of guys piled on top of each other move around on the ground for another three hours Look up sarcasm in the Oxford English dictionary Don t worry though an american can fix it In soccer you need to have more excitement Switch the goalie to a girl and after each successful goal that goalie must remove an article of clothing No more of those 1 0 matches from my figuring almost all matches will be 10 9 or 10 8 Rugby is easy just switch to girls we will never turn the channel 13 Further you will stop playing baseball It is not reasonable to hostan event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside ofAmerica Since only 2 1 of you are aware there is a world beyond yourborders your error is under standable You will learn cricket and we willlet you face the South Africans first to take the sting out of theirdeliveries First get your facts straight if you learned to do proper research you would know that Toronto as in the Toronto Blue Jays is not with in our countries borders Second of course we know their is a world outside of our borders we supply it with food we keep it employed by buying its products and we get a laugh at them when they try and criticize us 14 You must tell us who killed JFK It s been driving us mad Hell we thought you did it Come on you can tell us 15 An internal revenue agent i e tax collector from Her Majesty sGovernment will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all moniesdue backdated to 1776 Ok but you must pay all our Social Security benefits Welfare Benefits Wic Benefits and government subsidies back dated to 1776 Want to call that one even Else you might owe us some money We will send the lawyers over 16 Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper cups with saucers and never mugs with high quality biscuits cookies and cakes plusstrawberries with cream when in season Ok that confirms it You are pansies God Save the Queen If you weren t paying attention according to you God is the Queen Let her save herself But if she did that you would have to call her an American PS Go ahead and share this with your friends in the USA those with a goodsense of humour and NOT humor PS Go ahead and share this with your friends in the UK those with a good sense of humor oops my mistake there are none I would go on but You Know http://www.englishforums.com/English/NonNativeAccents/2/dmbdk/Post.htm#309869Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:40:21 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:309869marvin a.This is really badly off topic but I couldn t resist the temptation to comment on your correct observation I understand very well that native speakers of English mispronounce foreign words because foreign languages are not studied much in English speaking countries Well can you really blame us In order to pronounce all of the foreign names we re faced with we would have to know hundreds of different languages which not many of us do Also we would have to know how certain names are Anglicized that were written in different scripts such as Cyrillic or Greek We d also have to know the nationality of the name as well Also some spellings are altered when written in English We d also have to adapt the name to fit English rules anyway For example is a word ended with an E in English it would be pronounced as eI because E is not acceptable at the end of a word Also some languages have diacritic marks that don t exist in English This can change the pronunciation quite a bit Let s suppose someone had the name Analaupe In English this would probably be read as æn lAp or æn loUp Let s pretend that the name is Italian then we would approximate it by pronouncing it as An laUpeI But maybe the name s Hawaiian or Inuk perhaps Maybe it s Ethiopian or Greek We don t know What if it s French and the e is supposed to have an accent mark on it Also there are some sounds that we just can t prononounce and that we wouldn t use when speaking English For example many people pronounce Bach not as bax but as bAk_ We simply don t have the x sound in English Beethoven pronounced in English even by people who know how it ought to be pronounced is not betof n but rather betoUv n simply because it s spelt Beethoven People who have no idea how it s pronounced would say biToUv n But notice that even the people who know how it s pronounced in the original language don t even pronounce it correctly I suppose we should start criticizing the Japanese for pronouncing the name Smith as Sumisu san or Ryan as Laian san It took me a few seconds in the 1980s to realise an Englishman and I were talking about the same Swedish tennis player Björn BorgWell the average Anglophone does not know Swedish for one thing let alone even being able to identify that that name is Swedish I would say that most would pronounce it as b dZOr n as that s how it looks in English If they knew that in many languages j is pronounced as j rather than dZ they might say bjOr n The closest approximation in English of the name would be bjr n but notice that both the vowel and the r are still mispronounced English lacks that vowel sound as well as lacking that particular kind of r Yes the things you comment on are terrible but they are the result of pure ignorance Yeah they are But let s be reasonable Do you really expect English speakers to learn the orthography of every language on earth Let alone to be able to guess which language a particular name is from And to be able to guess how a particular name was altered to fit English orthography Or to say unusual sounds that don t exist in English Not to mention some people have altered the spelling and or pronunciation of their name after immigrating Before the formula driver Michael Schumacher whose name is always mispronounced there was another German Schumacher a football goalkeeper and a Eurosports commentator pronounced his name shoemaker Some English speaking people who have that particular German name actually do pronounce it SumeIkr For them SumAk or especially Sumax would be an incorrect pronunciation of their name Not all Anglophones know German And remember unlike in other languages in English one can pronounce ones name however one pleases regardless of how it s spelt Some Schumachers pronounce their name SumAk others Sumax others SumeIkr other s bOb Other Shumachers decide to become Schumakers or Schoemakers or Shoemakers or any number of spelling variants and pronounce it totally differently What I find almost amusing is the tendency to pronounce even foreign proper nouns say people s names as if they were English An Englishman has actually asked me how I would pronounce my name in English Maybe he found your name very difficult to pronounce and wanted to know if there was a shorter easier form of it in English People with the name Aliahiakanamakumachumanakatachita often have an English name of simply Ali Other people take on completely different names when visiting a foreign country In lots of language classes one picks for example a traditional German name or a French name such as Xavier and uses that name in class and uses it when visiting the foreign country instead of their actual name http://www.englishforums.com/English/NonNativeAccents/2/dmrhn/Post.htm#309651Tue, 02 Jan 2007 10:35:51 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:309651cool breeze J Lewis wrote As I said before we English speakers do equally bad things and worse in our pronunciation of foreign words The tendency is to pick on a particular transformation and apply it everywhere just to show that we know things are not as they seem at first sight without taking the trouble to find out the real pronunciation Hello J LewisThis is really badly off topic but I couldn t resist the temptation to comment on your correct observation I understand very well that native speakers of English mispronounce foreign words because foreign languages are not studied much in English speaking countries What I find almost amusing is the tendency to pronounce even foreign proper nouns say people s names as if they were English An Englishman has actually asked me how I would pronounce my name in English It took me a few seconds in the 1980s to realise an Englishman and I were talking about the same Swedish tennis player Björn Borg I have got used to most of these pronunciations but some of them are quite peculiar Before the formula driver Michael Schumacher whose name is always mispronounced there was another German Schumacher a football goalkeeper and a Eurosports commentator pronounced his name shoemaker CheersCBhttp://www.englishforums.com/English/Bottle/bdlcn/post.htm#101486Fri, 20 May 2005 13:47:49 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:101486mrpedanticI d say to fits quite well As for bottling I ve only heard bottle off in this kind of connection 1 The band played abysmally and were bottled off the stage i e they were forced to retreat in a hail of beer bottles Related verbs are bottle out to have lost one s bottle bottle it e g 2 We was all going to go down The Den on Saturday afternoon and sort out Millwall but MrP bottled out We were planning to visit Millwall Football Club s ground on Saturday afternoon and indulge in fisticuffs with some of their supporters but MrP suddenly remembered a previous engagement and decided not to accompany us 3 Sounds to me like MrP s lost his bottle I very much fear that MrP no longer has the stomach for a frank exchange of blows 4 Yeah an that ain t the first time he s bottled it either I agree especially in view of the fact that on previous occasions he has shown a similar reluctance Here s some more info from the Oxford Dictionary of New Words bottle noun In British slang courage spirit guts Usually in phrases such as have got a lot of bottle to be spirited or courageous to have guts lose one s bottle to lose one s nerve and so as a phrasal verb bottle out to lose one s nerve to pull out especially at the last minute Etymology The phrase no bottle has been used in underworld slang to mean no use worthless since the middle of the nineteenth century it is likely that this was reinterpreted this century to mean lacking substance or spirit and that from there bottle started to be used on its own and eventually to be incorporated into new phrases The rhyming slang expression bottle and glass for arse is often assumed to have something to do with these expressions in which case bottle would be more strictly guts but this may be no more than popular speculation History and Usage These phrases which are essentially part of the spoken language started to appear in written sources in the sixties as representations of Cockney or underworld speech Their use was reinforced by a milk marketing campaign in the early eighties the caption for which read It s gotta lotta bottle and by television series such as Minder in which Cockney expressions were brought to a wide audience Bottle out did not appear in the written language at all until the very end of the seventies at about the same time as this series was first shown Goodness was I going to give her a bad time Of course when it got down to it I bottled out completely Robert McLiam Wilson Ripley Bogle 1989 p 162 You appear not to have the bottle courtesy or wherewithal to actually approach her in person Just Seventeen Dec 1989 p 22 Some of the warders lost their bottle and just fled News of the World 8 Apr 1990 p 6 I d add Pronunciation Almost invariably with a central glottal stop MrP