You 🇬🇧 folks can be mad about how we pronounce “hover”, but at least we don’t absolutely butcher “router”.

@caseyliss as someone who’s not a native English speaker I’d have a hard time differentiating between root and route if both had that similarity in pronunciation in both US and UK English.

@caseyliss it’s actually all French ‘en route’, and ‘route’ in French is pronounced ‘root’. It means ‘on the way’ in French.

@caseyliss @dkatri In Israel, it’s “sal-mon”. Then again, there’s a street in Jerusalem named after the 16th president, which folks pronounce “link-oh-lin”.

@caseyliss And yet you put periods and commas outside quotation marks. Next you’ll be putting an “s” on the end of “math.”

@twostraws @caseyliss For some it has. I've heard it pronounced every combination of en/on + route/root in the US

@caseyliss What do you call that thing sold by Sears?

@caseyliss A router (root) is a networking device. A router (rout) is a woodworking power tool.

@caseyliss A Brit planned a route to be routed just right,
While a Yank routed his router all night.
“That’s not how you root!”
Laughed an Aussie en route—
“Your route’s fine, mate, but your root needs more bite.”

@wadiest

@ashpole I’m not into woodworking, so I don’t.

@drdrang That’s the programmer in me — the comma is not part of “hover” but part of the enclosing sentence. It’s a scope issue.

@drdrang @caseyliss I, for one, never liked the method I was taught for handling punctuation and quotes. In learning that I was taught the American convention, and that the British convention looked “right” to me, I immediately switched.

@drdrang @caseyliss Casey was telling me only this week that he was broadly in favour of metric units.

@drdrang @caseyliss this is one of those cases I know is “wrong”, but doesn’t make sense to me, so I refuse to participate.

@caseyliss The American pronunciation in my work that really bothers me: Tinnitus (Should be tin-ih-tus not tin-ay-tus or /ˈtɪnɪtəs/ if you want the IPA).

@Tirial I want to pronounce it tin-eye-tus, but yeah, apparently tinuh-tus is the norm?

@caseyliss At this point, both are in use, but the short “I” is correct. The root (see what I did there) word is from latin, so it maintains the latin stress, hence tin-ih-tus. In a bit of fun, the first written use of the word we have is from Pliny The Elder. Also… don’t do any of the things he suggests to cure it.

@caseyliss Dude, now try growing up in one country, moving to another for 13 years, and then to another for 13 years and counting. Throw in moving between TX & DE for good measure. All English speaking countries. All with different words (meanings) for the same things and very different pronunciations.

My accent and vocabulary doesn't know its ass/arse from its elbow.

@caseyliss I suspect everyone who’s programmed thinks that way. For me, it’s a challenge to follow the American convention, which is why I do it.

@jamesthomson @caseyliss That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.