Njrick's "Six of the Best" Challenge

NEW RULE FOR ROUND TWO

In case anyone (and that includes Glagla) is planning a second list of six stories (or in his case, five), you should be aware that I've decided to institute a THEME for Round 2. That theme shall be HUMOR (or as the Brits like to spell it, since they can't help throwing in superfluous letters, "humour").

Anyone who has NOT yet submitted a round one entry can still do so by merely following the original three rules. Anyone who submits a SECOND list must now also follow a new rule:

4) HUMOR Half of the entries for each person's second list (or in Glagla's case, 3 of 5) must feature (not merely include) an element of humor. The three humorous stories shall be identified as such.

If your favorites don't already include such stories, you can find some with the LSF's handy-dandy search function.

To be clear - the original three rules can be applied separately to your second list. You can repeat an author (including yourself) from your first list, just not within the second list.

Just to forewarn those thinking even further ahead -future rounds in the Challenge will have their own unique rules.

OMG! They spoke the language a thousand years before you guys did! It's you people who still haven't learnt how to spell properly...

Still... I'll do my five. They'll be all humour by the way. Most stories that I like is based on that, so that obstacle was easy to round

I know that this was just a flippant throwaway comment but British spelling is not just casual tossing in of extra letters. A very interesting book by David Crystal, "Spell It Out", explains that there were valid philological, morphological and etymological reasons behind the apparent eccentricities of British spellings of English.


In fairness to the Americans, however, their prime authority on spelling, Noah Webster's Dictionary, was published a good fifty years before the Oxford English Dictionary which is the British prime authority.

And in fairness to Mr Webster, many of the spellings he selected for his dictionary that we Brits decry as modern American abominations, were, in fact, preservations of an older usage dating to Shakespeare and before. Words such as color, center and, indeed, humor, appeared in the American form more frequently in Shakespeare's first folios than did the English form of colour, centre and humour.

Okay, so I bow my head in shame and admit that the Americans might have a point.

It's pretty much like ancient Scandinavian then and its influence on the current English. For example 'window' which is 'wind-eye' an opening for the wind into the house, imported with the vikings more than a thousand years ago to Britain. All while we up her have forgotten about it and have changed to the French 'Fönster' from the mid 18th century, because French was fashionable back then.

@brodiejlb
Thanks for keeping to my (our) defense, brodiejlb. Left to my own devices, I would have had to resort to making up half the stuff (which is the the new way we Americans have invented for winning arguments).

I would like to add, though, that not only is American spelling older (in certain cases), but it is objectively BETTER. Gaol vs jail? Come on! In many cases Mr. Webster didn't go far enough in correcting the inanity of British spelling. I know that superfluous letters are often the relics of Germanic pronunciations - the gh in light, night and tight, for instance, when lite, nite and tite would work so much better - but that's no excuse, since modern pronunciation had settled before spelling was standardized. Of course, without those spelling relics, we wouldn't have had the joy of "k-nig-its" in MP's "Holy Grail," so I suppose I shouldn't grouse too much.

This, of course, only applies to the Swedes who either murdered their kings or chose kings who were unable to reproduce, and hence had to import one of Napoleon's generals to remain a monarchy. In Norwegian, a window is still called "vindue" or in a variant spelling "vindauge" (vind=wind and auge=eye").

..we never should have let you go...

Btw, we didn't just import him to remain a monarchy. At that time we had run completely bankrupt after the gazillionth failed war down on the continent and he personally bailed us out. As thanks, he became king. No one else wanted to. I wonder if it wasn't the last time someone actually bought a country

Well, we are still stuck with his name on our most prominent street!

Oh, "potatoe, potato" as Vice President Quayle once said.

@carlspanks
Here in NJ in our state capital. I believe the poor young lad led astray by the VP was named William Figueroa, getting him his allotted 15 minutes of fame.