• PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world
    2·
    10 minutes ago

    I’m gonna take this chance to air my personal grievance with “Iodine”, which is commonly pronounced (in the US at least) “aye-o-dine”, but if we look at all of the other halogen, their “-ine” ending is pronounced “-een”, and therefore iodine should clearly be pronounced “aye-o-deen”.

  • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    48 minutes ago

    Go and get some platinium and if you want to go old fashioned you may like aurium.

  • pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    231·
    6 hours ago

    Am I the only one who finds differences in american vs british english cool, instead of a reason to be a dick

    • vithigar@lemmy.ca
      14·
      6 hours ago

      Let’s table that discussion.

      Tap for spoiler

      The meanings of “table” as a verb in US vs UK parliamentary usage are literally opposites. With the US meaning being to stop discussing or put aside for later, while the UK version means to begin discussing.

      This actually caused confusion during allied meetings in WWII.

  • lefixxx@lemmy.world
    171·
    6 hours ago

    Aluminium is not the -ium of alumin

    Aluminium is the genericitation of aluminum.

    The actual -ium is of alum. The original name is alumium.

    Aluminum is a modification of alumiun, not aluminium

  • ximtor@lemm.ee
    121·
    12 hours ago

    It confused me a bit when reading the Mistborn series. Wtf is aluminum and why have i never heard of that? Do they just call Aluminium differently because of story reasons? Did i miss something? Are the other metals correct?

    Good books tho

    • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
      6·
      7 hours ago

      Aluminum is the original name for the element. It was changed to be more in line with the others in its group.

    • gens@programming.dev
      5·
      10 hours ago

      Like in the tv shows when they say “epinephrine”, and I was like wtf is that? for years.

      And later on with the amazing metal called tungsten. Why have I never heard of it?

      (Its andrenaline and wolfram)

  • Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world
    73·
    12 hours ago

    What gets me is an Americanism that seems to have only taken hold in the last 10 years or so - Normalcy. Apparently it’s been in use since 1920 but I’m sure it’s only recently become ubiquitous in the US. The word is NORMALITY my American friends. Normalcy is a horrible Frankenstien word which sounds and looks horrible written. =p

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
    391·
    21 hours ago

    If you hate Americans because of this, of all things, then you’re going to lose your mind when you find out about everything that’s happened this year.

  • Wilco@lemm.eeEnglish
    497·
    1 day ago

    We say it the original correct way in the US. Other countries changed it for some reason. The guy that discovered it in 1808, Sir Humphrey Davy named it “Alumium” which based on Alumen (Latin for bitter salt)but quickly changed it to “Aluminum”. I swear I remember reading that he kept getting shit on by the science community and his friends for naming a metal “bitter salt” in Latin … but can’t find a reference.

    His colleagues in Britain did mess with him and start using the name “Aluminium” … exactly because it ended in “ium” like ALL the other elements (Oxygenium, Carbonium, Ironium, Zincium, Nitrogenium, and the like). They US just kept the name the discoverer wanted instead of giving into those British asshats that just wanted to troll Sir Davy.

    He also isolated Magnesium and named it “magnium”, but later changed to magnesium. The guy just couldnt settle on names. Again, in my version of reality it is because his friends kept giving him shit.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
      83·
      13 hours ago

      We say it the original correct way in the US

      .

      Sir Humphrey Davy named it “Alumium”

      • Wilco@lemm.eeEnglish
        22·
        6 hours ago

        I explained the whole naming process. You gotta read it. The US was given the name as Aluminum and did not change it when the British changed it a third time.

        • gmtom@lemmy.world
          11·
          6 hours ago

          But aluminum is nit the original name and you explain that. It’s also not the correct way either.

          • Wilco@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            28 minutes ago

            Welcome to ignore. Everyone else understood the discussion … you are the outlier.

    • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
      182·
      1 day ago

      They US just kept the name the discoverer wanted instead of giving into those British asshats that just wanted to troll Sir Davy.

      It probably wasnt really a willful defiance thing. It’s likely more correct to say that we kept the name because by the time they changed it officially in Europe, we had millions of students across the country that had textbooks with the name Aluminum in it, that had already been taught the original name, and if the inconsistentcy was even important enought to consider “correcting”, it was likely deemed too costly and too much of a headache to change at the time. By the time people were buying reprints/new editions/more recently written textbooks anyway, professional chemists in the US had been calling it Aluminum for years. Given how isolated we were from Europe in the early 1800s, there was very little pressure to align with them on it, and so it stayed. The longer it stayed the more likely it was to be permanent, and here we are.

      But yeah, Sir Humphrey Davy was an indecisive wishy-washy namer of elements, disseminated multiple names across the world, but somehow that is our fault when we just stuck with the one we were given and everyone else changed over nitpicky conventions. It’s not the only thing that Brits shit on about American English that is entirely their invention or their mistake:

      • “Soccer” being a British term short for “Association Football”

      • The season “Fall” being a British term shortened from the phrase “The Fall of the Leaf” and directly complementary to “Spring” which comes from the phrase “The Spring of the Leaf”, which they still use despite making fun of Americans for “Fall” instead of their “Autumn”, which Americans also use.

      • “Dove” instead of “dived”, “pled” instead of “pleaded”, “have gotten” instead of “have got”, etc. all started in Britain but were dropped there and stayed in the US.

      • “Herb” being pronounced with an audible “h”. The word is borrowed from French, where the h is silent, exactly like , “honorary”, and “honesty”. Neither country pronounces either of those words with an “h” sound, but that doesnt stop people like Eddie Izzard shitting on how Americans say it with a silent “h” despite the American pronunciation being, arguably, more correct given the word’s origins.

      Side note, it is crazy how many words in English are borrowed from French, even if they are horribly mangled and unrecognizable now in a lot of cases. The British Aristocracy really had their noses shoved firmly up French asses for a lot of their history in the last few centuries.

    • Doom@ttrpg.network
      174·
      1 day ago

      Just like soccer.

      Look the language is ours now england, you lost the right.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
      23·
      13 hours ago

      No, it’s was Alumium originally. So you guys changed it too, but decided to chsbge it to something worse.

      • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
        112·
        1 day ago

        Alumina ore was smelted/refined to isolate the pure metal.

        Using the preexisting naming convention that ore->metal goes a->um, the discoverer of the element named it Aluminum.

        Later, British chemists got mad that their US naming standard was different from their own standard.

        • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
          53·
          1 day ago

          no.

          the discoverer, humphry davy, was english. the name is originally the english “alum” and the latin “ium”, which was criticized because names were traditionally constructed from latin roots. european scientists suggested “aluminium”, for “element created from alum”, but the year after that, when davy published a chemistry book, he spelled it “aluminum”. this took hold in britain, but the rest of europe used “aluminium” so they standardized.

          a few years later, when the word first appeared in an american dictionary, only the “num” spelling was added. scientists kept using “-ium” but the general populace went on the dictionary definition until it won out. the “american” spelling was only accepted by american scientists about 110 years after the element was discovered.

          • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
            111·
            19 hours ago

            So the guy who discovered it published a book and named his discovery in his book “aluminum”?

            Well case closed. It’s aluminum.

            • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
              14·
              13 hours ago

              and then scientific consensus made him change it. there was a clique of, quote, “patriotic” englishmen who, worried about “foreign influences”, kept using the misspelling, but they were very few and very much gone by the time the americans changed their minds.