Declaration

Bout F***ing time!

I did not laugh.

He can go jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Seriously. It wasn't amusing.

Absolutely hilarious.

Sounds like someone needs to drive around some more roundabouts.

Some of it was funny, other parts were just dumb and would've been handled much better if Cleese were to actually write something like that.

John Cleese owns. It was funny, but it obviously wasn't him.

I'm for it.

I'm ashamed someone would insult such a funny man by tacking his name on such an unfunny piece.

The ones on snopes.com were more funny.

The World Series can take place in Canada too sometimes.

amusing.

Funny...

BUT TRUE!!!

ps i doubt cleese wrote much of that, its not his style

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Only in theory. :p

meh... not that amusing at all..

So guys on a scale of one to thirteen how amusing would this be?

1 to 13? What the hell kind of scale is that?

Hah, actually, it sounds kind of like the Imperial measurement system.

Anyway, I really laughed at that part about circulating a questionairre to determine if anyone noticed or not.

I found it quite comedic.

I found it absolutely hilarious.

Those of you who didn't think it was funny have been tasked with looking up "humour" in the dictionary and then finding the nearest roundabout. (To my knowledge, the closest to me is about a 45 minute drive).

Ahaha, that was hilarious.

It was bloody great. Shame about the lameness on part of the author.

EDIT: And the Snopes' stuff was great, too. Especially...

9. We'll tell you who killed JFK when you apologize for "Teletubbies".

How accurate.

That was the only funny part.

Seriously, he sounded much too bitter and serious, which made it unfunny.

ALL of it was fantastic. I agreed with everything. Obviously, I'm British. I just smiled and nodded for all his points.

Especially the spelling point. US English my arse!

It fairly obviously wasn't written by John Cleese...

But it was still funny.

The rebbutal versions would have been funny if they weren't a using all the same points. Also, why do americans insit that 'aluminum' is correct when it's not.

The rebuttal to the "aluminium" point is usually along the lines of "The dude that discovered it gets to name it!". This is completely unsubstantiated, and it has happened many many times through science that the dude that initially discovers something calls it 'x' but over time it is found that 'x' isn't a very good name, isn't sensible or logical, contradicts something else, or is generally confusing.
The scientific community decides on this, given everything else that they know, and they decide on a different name. Yes, there are things that probably should have different names (like 'atom' and 'baryon'), but renaming them would be very difficult and wouldn't really help much anyway. However, 'aluminum' and 'aluminium' is quite significant, as the difference is so subtle, it could easily cause confusion and lead to the spelling of other elements without 'ium' endings.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has the official spelling as aluminium, based on the many other elements ending with -ium and none ending merely -um.

That's really a whole lot better than "Oh but Humphry Davy in 1808 originally decided 'aluminum' (but changed his mind in 1812), and the only reason 'aluminum' fell into fashion was because of Charles Martin Hall who read old documents with the out-dated spelling when filing his patent!"

rofl.... that was so hilarious. I had to agree with all the points, and I'm not even British!

Best point was about the spelling! Like Goit said:



Exactly!!!!

Right.

I'm in two minds about 'z' though.

The purpose of spelling is to give a rough idea of how to pronounce a word, but short of using a full on phonetic alphabet, it is always going to be an approximation.

'American English' appears to be an attempt to simplify English and remove unnecessary stuff, which is a thoroughly sensible idea. The problem is that it isn't done very well. 'Color' is a good example, in removing the second 'u'.
When saying the word 'colour', there are two very different vowel sounds in 'co' and 'luh'. The second vowel sound might not be consistent with what we normally consider an 'ou' sound to be ('oo' as in 'through'), but it most certainly is not consistent with the first vowel sound 'o'. The best approximation is probably something like 'coleur'.

Inconsistency across lexis is one thing, but inconsistency within the same word is absurd. Try saying 'color' making sure the two vowel sounds are identical.



But with 'z' it is a different matter.

In the word 'standardisation', the first and second 's' sounds are quite different (say the word 'sensation' to hear the difference, with both 's' sounds in that word being identical).
It would make more sense to represent the second 's' sound in 'standardisation' with a different letter, and 'z' is generally unused so it is a sensible candidate.

COLA? :p

That was freaking funny. Being Canadian the only insult to me I found in there was that he ignored us about talking about fries, chips, football and baseball.

Oh well, we just get to keep our silly traditions.

That's really strange that there's two words for aluminium (yep showed my bias here).

You know what's even stranger? Some people call kalium 'potassium'? I'm an open-minded guy, but COME ON that's just silly... :banned: :banned: :banned:

I'm not so sure. It depends how you pronounce 'ise'. If you pronounce it like 'ice' then you'd get standard-ice which sounds wrong but if you pronounce it like 'eyes' then it's better than 'ize'. Think about it, ize does't fit consistantly with the rest of the English language. For example 'is' is not 'iz'.



Not once have I heard the word 'Kalium'.

Just like all the fools who call argentum 'silver.' :p

I dunno, I've often said Cuprum or Plumbum. In fact, I think we got the word "plumber" from the true name of the element lead. Pipes were comprised of lead back in the day.

Don't forget Aurium!

Ferrum, Cuprum -> Aluminum

Very funny!

If anyone wants to send me vast amounts of Aurium I'll accept

That's not really how it works.

The pronunciation of a certain letter always depends on the 'place' of that letter in relation to the other letters.

For example, look at the word 'station'.

The second T is not nearly the same sound as the first T. This is just one example. There are so many combinations like that... the letter 'y' for example... compair 'year' to 'many'. If you would replace all the letters in English with the letters they actually sound like, you'd alter the entire spelling of the language.

I remember reading this like, years ago. That or something similar. But I'm pretty sure it was this since he talks about wanting a rugby match in 2005, which we're almost at the end of. Some of it is pretty funny, other parts are just meh.

After reading the snopes article, it was probably a variant of this that I read.