therealljidol | Work Room

Entry tags:

Work Room - Week 8

This week's topic http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/507748.html could end up going in any number of directions - and knowing Idolers, it will. But before you run off, let me direct you to a definition of "travesty" that doesn't go into a dark place.

"a literary or artistic burlesque of a serious work or subject,characterized by grotesque or ludicrous incongruity of style,treatment, or subject matter." (from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/travesty )

I try not to steer people toward things. Even when I do, no one tends to listen. ;) But I think there is a ton of things that can be done with just this part of the definition alone - and then take it on the road!! :)

I've brought in an old hand at creating works of wonder on the fly. Someone who knows the ins and outs, of pretty much everything.

Our Season 7 Winner, and reigning LJ Idol - and this week's Mentor -

amenquohi!!

***

Hello everyone! I can't believe I'm back in the Idol Pool again - though to be fair, I'm not treading water (or drowning) with the rest of you.

Instead, I now get to lounge in indolent splendor here on the sidelines,with a fruity drink in my hand. It's a nice place to be.

So here I am, four-time veteran and one time winner, professional(paid!) blogger, with a book deal in the works (fingers crossed) and one hell of a lot of luck. If you don't believe me, check out the entries from the final three last season. Or five. Or ten. This contest can come
down to one vote, and I am living proof. That, above all means that you just can't phone it in. You need to bring your A-game more often than not, and in the later weeks, you need to erase every other letter but "A" from your game alphabet. No pressure, though.

I'm happy to answer any questions (entirely from my own viewpoint, ofcourse, YMMV), cheerlead, and offer whatever limited resources my braincan manage. I'll start by imparting this piece of wisdom that saved meon many an Idol week when I was staring blankly into space and saying "Uhhhhhhhhhhhh".

The first rule of Thesaurus Club is that you do not talk, articulate, babble, broach, chant, chat, chatter, comment on, communicate, confess,converse, describe, divulge, drawl, drone, express, flap one's tongue,gab, gabble, give voice to, gossip, influence, intone, notify, palavar,parley, patter, persuade, prattle, prounounce, reveal, rhapsodize, run on, say, soliloquize, speak, spill the beans, spout, squeak, squeal,tell, tell all, use, utter, ventriloquize, verbalize, voice or yak about Thesaurus Club.

In other words, use your Thesaurus.

Seriously. When the prompt comes up,pick a keyword (or the word itself, if it's a one-word prompt) and pull out the Thesaurus. I had many times when the prompt itself didn't
immediately ring bells for me, but a synonym suddenly triggered acreative landslide. It's a good trick, and it saved my ass more than a few times.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

LOL I think you missed the conversation earlier in the comments - I don't think anyone cares whether you spell it traveling or travelling. I'm in the US and I still PREFER travelling, honestly, because it follows the 'rules' we were taught in elementary school instead of being an exception. :) [double the vowel and then add 'ing']
Besides that, I'm a visual speller and that just LOOKS right.

By the way, what to they teach in the U.S. schools about the words that are spelled differently in Britain?

I mean, are British spellings considered mistakes, correct variants, or just the same, when you choose whichever you prefer?

In my experience it depended upon the school. My primary school was Anglican, so most of our teachers either were from the UK or Australia/New Zealand. I initially learned to spell the British way. When we moved and I enrolled in a typical suburban parochial school, it was considered WRONG because it wasn't "American". That stayed up until I was in high school. My high school, for some reason, didn't discern either spelling. Maybe it was because it was private school? I have no idea.

I had to go back to the American spelling when I took a secretarial course, though. When I taught? Certainly -- it was a public school. I taught a few kids, though, who were from other countries, and they all spelled the British way. I never marked them down on it.

Wow, this must be pretty confusing.

Thank you!

In K-12 I don't remember hearing anything about them one way or the other!

At university, my professors didn't mind if people used whatever spellings they were used to (it's different again in Canada, Australia, etc.) or American ones, but they had to be consistent (to whatever the professor's understanding of consistent is!).

Interesting.

Thanks :)

On the other side of this, I'm British and we would have been marked down at school for using American spellings, because they weren't correct to Britain, if that made sense. When I was at uni, however most lecturers didn't mind, so long as we were consistent - although I did have a friend who was marked down for using "theater" instead of "theatre" so I never quite know. I just always use British spelling, because it is what I was taught, so it's what I know.

We were also taught British spelling when learning English, but now on the internet sometimes it gets confusing: is this a typo or an American spelling? :)

Thank you!

It's up to the teacher, but spellcheck marks them as mistakes. And we were usually required to spellcheck our work here. For me, this didn't happen until high school, but they've changed the curriculum to introduce computers in kindergarten, so now it's from late elementary on.

There are both British and American spellchecks too nowadays :).

Thank you!

Yes, and if I were to take the time to convince my computer that I really truly do indeed want the British language pack, it would be willing to install it, now that I'm home; but in school all the computers were mandatorily Americanized.

(deleted comment)

I always use "theater" for things like "movie theater" and "theatre" for things like "theatre class" or "a play in the theatre". I thought it was one of those things where they sound the same but are spelled different -- what are those? Homonyms?

Is not 'movie theaTRe' ( :-) ) what the place is called in the U.S. as opposed to something else in GB, cinema maybe?

(At least we always called the place 'cinema' at school, and were taught British English, more or less.)

(deleted comment)

I've seen cinemas, but they basically seem to be theaters that happen to be in a mall. Oh, and no arcade games.

And we still call them movie theaters even when they're labelled cinemas.

(deleted comment)

Thank you!

...I suppose I could have just Googled it, couldn't I? Oops.

That would explain why I've had to have a conversation with every spellcheck I've ever owned regarding the use of "theatre". (And Firefox just marked that wrong, lol.) (Of course, Firefox also thinks "lol" is wrong, and we all know that's a word. ^_^ )

Lol, I spell movie theater "M O V I E Space T H E A T R E Backspace Backspace E R". ;)

(deleted comment)

(no subject)

jem0000000.livejournal.com - 2011-12-14 14:59 (UTC) - Expand

(deleted comment)

(no subject)

jem0000000.livejournal.com - 2011-12-15 03:00 (UTC) - Expand

I guess it was.

It was funny, too, when we learned some programming at school, and were told something along the lines "you know that programme is spelled this way, but in [language], they use the American spelling, so write 'program begin'".

When I was in school we were not taught about American spelling. No need to, really. It doesn't apply to us so there really wasn't any need to teach it.

(I'm an Aussie)

Thank you.

We were not either, in Russia.

Totally depends on the school and the teacher, though I never had a teacher say the Brit spellings were flat-out mistakes. I had one or two stuffy teachers (college level) who specified in the syllabus that writing assignments needed to be in American standard English, but one of those profs, it turns out, wasn't stuffy at all, and only put that in there to ease any confusion that non native English speaking students might have, as it had been an issue in the past. (A wise-ass British kid in the class stayed after to talk to the prof the day before a paper was due and acted all mock-offended by the policy. The prof explained the reasoning, and said she wouldn't actually count off for Brit spellings.)

Generally speaking though, the academic experiences I've had have overwhelmingly been "Brit spellings are correct variants." (Though I did have an elementary teacher who got onto me for spelling that black-white color "grey", insisting it was flat-out misspelled, so I changed it in my head, got in the habit of using an "a"... and then my teacher the NEXT year had a fit when she saw me spelling it "gray", because "It's an e! Just like you'd spell 'hey'" I just switched back to "e" and left it that way, but now firefox is telling me the e-version is misspelled. I GIVE UP!)

Both "grey" and "gray" are correct in American English; they're listed in several of my dictionaries as variants of each other. :)

LOL! Yeah, I totally missed that! I thought I'd skimmed everything, but I obviously hadn't had enough coffee when I looked this morning!!
And, yes, I'm a visual speller, too! - I'm a visual writer, overall - the shape of the words and the sentences are weirdly important to me... if they're "not right" then they have to change!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All