I mean fair enough, but it made me laugh.
Now this is the kind of innovation we need
Some British words are better and some American words are better. It just depends.
I’m from the UK and I think “Trash” and “Garbage” are much more aggressive sounding than “Rubbish”. And I like that.
I prefer “landfill”
🇬🇧 English (Traditional)
🇺🇸 English (Simplified)
🇬🇧 English
🇺🇲 Pidgin English
A pidgin language is a simplified language that appears when people need to communicate with each other, but they don’t have a common language. But if the situation lasts long enough for children to grow up learning the mixture of languages as their native language then it quickly evolves into a creole. The difference is that a creole is not a simplified language, and it has regular grammar. While growing up children always “reanalyze” their language to regularize grammar and fill in gaps in expressiveness. This is a main driver in shifts in all languages. The effect is especially profound when starting from an irregular, simplified language.
Because of reanalysis pidgins tend to either be temporary, or to give way to creoles. I don’t know of a pidgin that exists in the US right now. There are creoles - there are some details here
Throwback to Microsoft renaming “zip file” to “postcode file” in English.
The difference here obviously being that actual humans worked on the localisation Mint uses, whereas I’m sure Microsoft just uses machine translation.
I’ve never associated .zip files with mailing addresses, a lot of the time they have a zipper pull tab as if you’re zipping up tight clothing around them to make them smaller. Nothing to do with the Zone Improvement Plan.
Amusing fact: There was a tool similar to winzip or winRAR for the classic mac called “Stuffit” which I think is the most superior name.
I don’t think they are, it was just Microsoft screwing things up. I’ve never heard someone call them postcode archives.
That’s funny, I hadn’t heard that before. Situations like this is why actual humans will always make better translators (overall).
Native readers can almost always tell when something was just run through a translation tool, because translation is about meaning, not just word/phrase replacement. Even LLMs will make weird contextual mistakes because there’s no fundamental understanding of meaning.
Yeah, this feels like a courtesy thing. I just didn’t expect it.
(And only just now noticed after switching three weeks ago since this was the first time I had to delete anything in all that time.)
Ah yes, the old “packed octet sequence, total compression of data encoding” format. It was invented by the boffins at Bletchley between cracking Enigma, and don’t let Phil Katz tell you any different. ~waggles finger~
Several years back, I set my phone’s language to UK English so the voice assistant would be British, and my flashlight button changed to “Torch”.
Unfortunately mine says flashlight which is a mild annoyance since it doesn’t flash.
You’re not pushing the button fast enough.
So you’re saying it’s light on flash
Which is objectively a better word. Ah Americans - twice the syllables, twice the letters, and it doesn’t even flash!
Reminiscent of “elevator”, except that has four times the syllables! “Transportation” (transport), “burglarize” (burgle), “garbage collector” (dustman), “apartment” (flat)… I’m detecting a pattern.
It’s nice that in Star Trek they went with British English for their turbolifts.
Can you imagine having to say turboelevator? shudders
They can flash by pressing the button. On some flashlights partially pressing and releasing the button flashes the light off and on. That’s a notable difference from, say, lanterns where you need a cover or shield for signalling.
The problem with “torch” is that there’s already a thing called “torch”, and now I don’t know which thing you mean. The word “flashlight” has avoided critical ambiguity in many of our Indiana Jones movies.
They can flash by pressing the button
Oh come on, this is obvious post-hoc justification!
The problem with “torch” is that there’s already a thing called “torch”,
Indeed, it’s a thing that you hold in your hand to provide light, as it has been for thousands of years.
Never really thought about it, but yeah, it’s always been “Rubbish Bin” for me.
The directories created on filesystems for temporary storage are still called
.Trash-*though.It’s “Wastebasket” in the UK on the GNOME desktop. I’m happy enough with that.
Gnome is going for the avocado-toast-eating market.
?
Fancy thing to call it maybe?
Can confirm. It always seems overly verbose, though. Why not just bin? Or Rubbish? Nobody IRL would ever say “rubbish bin”.
I guess because ‘bin’ is a shorthand of ‘binary’, that is, the directory where all your executable files reside, so the developers felt a need to clarify that /usr/bin isn’t to be cleaned.
I thought the ‘bin’ folder in program folders was where they put trash for longer than I’d like to admit. >_<
Well, that’s better than moving all your binaries to the rubbish bin
Oy! Mum’s the word, old chap, don’t go blabbing to the Yanks, or they’ll be removing it faster than a Londoner can say “cheerio”!
Sorry
So you’re saying they should hit the rubout button?
Blimey, that horse has already bolted :(
Ya put it in the bin
