homesick_american

Low rise jeans and a tramp stamp is even worse. Add a thong into the mix and TA DA!

What's funny is when the really overweight girls do it and that large strip of skin between the bottom of their shirt (or coat) and the tops of their trousers is jerking back and forth as they walk. It's hypnotic...like a metronome. I think if someone filmed them and showed it to them, they'd die of embarrassment.

I just googled tramp stamp, didn't know what that was. I have one, btw. It's interesting how americans will label you that because of a body art. I'd never go through this kind of prejudice in Brazil.

It's not just Americans, nessa. The tramp stamp is also often looked down upon by the British.

Look what I found the other day, though (in a shop in Cincinnati)... I had to buy it, just for the name! (Oh... and are US Milky Ways really the same as UK Mars Bars? I didn't know that!)

No; they're similar but not identical.

Corruption or bastardization is a way of referring to certain changes in a language. The most common way that a word can be said to be corrupted is the change of its spelling through errors and gradual changes in comprehension, transcription, and hearing. This is especially common with words borrowed from another language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_(linguistics)

bastardization does not been it has been abused it just means it has changed..... and Yes America has basderdized the english language and it has become American English..... there is a diffrence..

Kez

Ironically, you used the American spelling of bastardization. Being English I'll stick to bastardisation.

j/k

Didn't want to point that out, I thought Kez had embarrassed herself enough already...but BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Well as far as I am concerned I speak English and my Husband and everyone else who comes from the US speak American.... there are enough diffrences to make them 2 diffrent languages...

Kez

Well...to me that is an incredibly snotty attitude to have, not to mention the fact that you're dead wrong. Very very educated people called "linguists" disagree with you. British English and American English are not separate languages but are DIALECTS of the SAME language.

Also...if you Brits had not colonized 40% of the planet, you might not have to put up with people spelling your precious language slightly differently or speaking it with funny accents. However, you did. Deal with the consequences.

I filled my taxes "Married filing jointly" since Kathlene and I married last year and got her ITIN # and all that good stuff. Now I got my/our tax refund check in the mail today and took it to the bank. THEY WOULD'T DEPOSIT IT! They said it had to be a joint account since it had both our names on it and they can't put her name on my account until she is here in person to sign the papers. So I am sure the same thing will happen when I get my state refund as well.

Has anyone else run into this before? I understand their concerns about fraud and the bank manager said the Treasury Dept would return the check without both signatures on the back.

OH well, I guess I will just put them both in the safe and wait until this fall and we can use the money for a short delayed honeymoon after she lands in the US.

Now I could mail them to Kathlene and have her sign them and mail two SIGNED checks back to me, but that doesn't sound like too good of an idea.

Maybe I should have filed 'Married filing separately' and I wouldn't have had that problem, but I must admit I didn't see this coming!

You can't cash it alone because it's not only your money; it's hers, too. Her name is on it, so she at least has to endorse the check before you can cash it. Personally, I'd be furious if my bank cashed a check with my name on it that I did not endorse.

You say there is no excuse for native english speakers to have bad grammer.... does that include people who are dislexic..... and there are many words that are spelt diffrently here in America than they are in England so who is right??? the British, where the language came from or the Americans who have bastardized it???

Kez

Bastardized it? I beg to differ. English spelling and even pronunciation was not standardized when we threw the British out of the US. The British were the colonial masters of every other English-speaking country on the planet, so when they DID standardize spelling and pronunciation they were able to impose these standards on every English-speaking nation except one: the United States. We standardized spelling and pronunciation as well; we just used a different standard.

If the British wanted our English to be just like theirs, perhaps they should have polished it and standardized its spelling before losing the Revolutionary War.

So...to answer your question...both of us are right.

Europe is fading, and fading fast; and they really have noone to blame but themselves.

They can always blame the USA and global warming.

LOL...Europe needs to walk the walk on environmental issues before they can point the finger at us for ANYTHING. Pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.

I think some people here are being too harsh on Daisy. I understand what she's feeling and I think it's natural for her to be frustrated, particularly when it may appear to her that other UK applicants from the same time period are getting things done faster than she is. It's easy to dump on someone and say they lack perspective, but it is INCREDIBLE how quickly you forget the frustration of being separated from a loved one or waiting on the US government to do something.

Personally I thought we were here to support people when they were going through hard times...not to berate them for complaining about what is an incredibly frustrating and stressful process. Just my $.02.

June 8, 2001.

I'm gonna have to look this up when I have more time. Working in Mental Health, my initial concern is, as you say, what gets included and how. A big part of my job is to lessen the stigma of mental illness and the media stereotype of mad, random, unpredictable acts of violence on the general populace. Although there are certainly people who should not have access to firearms, my concern is that this could lead to taking a step back in terms of humanising the real issues of mental illness. (Unwieldy sentence - apologies. Blame the Taco Bell spicy chicken crunchwrap supreme and the long weekend off I'm already anticipating.)

I think there is at least as much danger of mentally ill people harming themselves with firearms as there is of them perpetrating random acts of violence on people. Would you want it to be easy for a clinically depressed individual to get his hands on a gun?

I'm all for it.

I had a non-native english speaking friend of mine who had difficulty with the "th" sound. He wanted to comment to a young lady about how beautiful her teeth were. When he spoke it he ended up commenting on how beautiful her "teets" were......

It's not very nice to make fun of a non-native speaker though; it's kind of cruel. I think what the OP was complaining about was native speakers making such simple mistakes over and over again.

Didn't Zimbabwe have a food surplus a few years ago?

You can still find some produce from Zimbabwe in UK supermarkets; the ones I tend to see now are green beans and chili peppers. Tesco is particularly bad about selling produce from Zimbabwe; we complained to them and they didn't give a toss. Sainsbury's used to stock goods from Zimbabwe but I haven't seen any in a couple of years; it seems they're getting green beans and chili peppers from neighboring African countries.

I think it's completely unacceptable for UK businesses to purchase exports of food from Zimbabwe when the people who LIVE there don't have enough to eat. It's revolting.

I think it's time for the USA to step up to the plate and at least do SOMETHING...no political interference, mind you, but we should be sending food, medical supplies, medical personnel, etc. to see the people through the crisis that IS coming...it is only a question of when. We should also be pushing the United Nations to try Mugabe as genocidal maniac since he's committing genocide against his OWN people. He's a disgusting pig of a man. He's not even a man. He's an IT.

The UK is no better than the USA in this respect; as Zimbabwe's former colonial power it has exercised very little influence or control over the situation and is even balking at the number of Zimbabwean refugees finding their way into the UK. Some of them are getting asylum, but the government is also sending Zimbabwean refugees back to a country where they have no prospects of employment, the country itself is extraordinarily violent, and there is a distinct possibility of starving to death and really great odds of dying before their fortieth birthday. It is disgusting.

With unemployment rates in the double digits, some areas as high 30%, it doesn't make a first bit of sense to me that there are labor shortages in Germany, for example. What companies are looking for, however, is a cheap work force that shuts the ** up. There's going to be major trouble over this as the chronically unemployed and underemployed will have a hard time understanding why they have been applying for hundreds of jobs without ever being considered while here come immigrants that immediately have a job and income. It won't be pretty, that's for sure.

Some of my friends back home are desperately looking for an exit from Germany. They say that they work ever more for ever less in terms of compensation. Canada is becoming more and more attractive to them. Some have eyed Australia as well.

ITA. I find it hard to believe that Germany needs workers because its unemployment rate is in the 10% range. Even the UK's unemployment rate is 5.5%, higher than that of the USA. France's unemployment is dismal, and Poland's is 15%.

Europe is fading, and fading fast; and they really have noone to blame but themselves.

Oh talking about English. I have trouble to pronounce some words. I can't make it right for some words for example ; "sheet" and "sh!t". Couple days ago Dan taught me the right way to pronounce "Cutlery". Took 2 days to to get it right.

-G

I'm Texan and nobody understands me either....

The accent is awesome though.

Lose/loose is annoying.

Fiance/fiancee is also annoying. It's one e for a man, two for a woman.

Its/it's, your/you're, and there/their/they're are obvious ones.

One mistake I've noticed, from educated professionals and even people who claim to be teachers, is 'definately'. THERE IS NO 'A' IN DEFINITELY.

About time. I go to work in the morning and I have about 100 spam messages waiting for me. I hope these idiots go to prison for a long, long time.

Weird...I never get spam. Ever. And I have a HOTMAIL account!

well i think its a little of both. my ex's friend chose to be in poverty so he could get welfare benifits cuz he was sickly. so he thought it was better to live poorly as long as he had medical benifits.

now on the other hand some people are just simply to stupid to want to better themselves. example...my neice is pregnant with her 3rd child now. 3 different fathers...none of them working...none paying support...living on welfare...cant get ahead cuz she is just to stupid to realize kids cost money so stop spreading ur legs. does she want to be poor...no. but she is so far buried cuz of her stupid choices she cant get out easily. so this is the condition she got herself into. wasnt by choice but by stupidity.

Well...it was a choice; she could have chosen not to have sex with those men, she could have chosen to use protection, she could have chosen to have abortions, etc. There were a lot of choices she could have made to avoid the situation she's in. Just because you feel she's "stupid" does not mean that she lacked for choices here.

When a friend gets married, how much are you expected to spend?

Spend what you think you can reasonably afford. When I got married I did not expect any dollar amount from any of my friends; they mostly bought items off the registry and I did not keep track of who spent what because that's really shallow, though I did keep track of who bought what for the thank-you notes; I was told that mentioning the gift they gave in the note was proper etiquette. I deliberately built our registry with items for every budget.

Six years after my wedding, I can't even remember who gave me what or how much it cost. It's not important to me; I got married for love, not for the presents.

As with most of this type of assessment I think the importance placed on examinations is overly disproportionate - more of an emphasis should be given to coursework IMO. Having done enough examinations through HS, College and University to last a lifetime - I honestly don't believe that they are a fair test of a person's ability as so much relies on... for example, what side of bed you got out of in the morning; or if you are going into the exam hall crippled with allergies.

While I got out of my High School (in 1994) with respectable grades, I honestly believe I could (and would) have done much better in a different school and a more healthy learning environment. In that respect, the comprehensive wasn't the best environment for me, psychologically speaking.

That's a whole other kettle of fish...I agree that British schoolchildren take a ridiculous number of exams. When I was a kid in Texas public schools, we took standardized tests to measure our progress but these were not given in the lower primary grades and were not given every year. In high school we had to take an exit exam in order to graduate but the test was so easy that nobody I knew gave it much thought after passing it in 10th grade, two full years before graduation. Some core subjects used standardized final exams in secondary school but some didn't, and since examination trends were so fleeting it never seemed to be the same year on year.

Since the US system is a baccalaureate system in (to my knowledge) all fifty states, standardized tests aren't as common as they are in the UK and qualifications in a single subject at the secondary level basically don't exist. University entrance exams like the SAT or the ACT are optional, as are all SAT-II exams, sometimes called "achievement tests", as they are taken only by university-bound students. AP tests are also optional and the scores can be assessed for university credit. I took three SAT-IIs and five AP exams as a high school senior but I took more tests than the average student. A few took more, but most took fewer. US students probably take more standardized tests now than I took as a student, but NCLB was way after my time; I graduated from high school in 1993 prior to the current craze for standardized tests.

I think an examination is not an entirely objective way to measure a pupil's abilities, since it also reflects their socioeconomic background and the quality of instruction they've received...but since coursework is not universal and teachers are not clones, coursework is not an objective measurement either particularly since you now have pushy parents pestering or even threatening teachers and support staff at schools so that their children receive higher marks. This is true in the UK and the US.

As for your education...clearly you are an intelligent, well-spoken, and educated person so it can't have been all bad. I don't think any of us can really say that we got a perfect education with nothing but terrific teachers in an environment that was always conducive to learning. My high school had pregnant girls; kids on marijuana, cocaine, and heroin; a student who was shot and killed for his car my sophomore year; a race riot immediately after the Rodney King verdict in LA; several bomb threats; and day-to-day disruptions from kids who didn't really want to be there. I went to school in one of America's largest cities and the student body at my high school included kids from some of Dallas's wealthiest families, and kids from some of Dallas's poorest families. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and kids from every continent and religion you could think of. It was not a homogenous mix and it wasn't even always a happy mix, but most of us did OK. I had a few outstanding teachers, but most were just average and I had some who were really bad. My 10th grade English teacher mostly let us fart around in class while he worked on other things; he was the school's baseball coach and clearly had no interest in teaching, but coaches in my school were required to teach since coaching high school sports isn't really a full-time job. I used to hate getting coaches as teachers; there was only one who was any good. My first-year Spanish teacher was a coach, and by the time I got to second-year Spanish, which was taught by a different teacher, I didn't know anything. The second-year Spanish teacher had to work flat out to get us up to speed before she could even start on the second-year curriculum, which wasn't fair to us or to her. Yep...we had plenty of sh!tty teachers!

So i guess everyone wants more amnesty cases, shame

That's a very simplistic way of looking at our election process.

While i do not agree with the Republicans, i definitely do not agree with any group that is for Big Government.

So yes, it is simplistic in nature but only because it is a fundamental issue for me.

I'd never vote for candidate because of a single issue - compromise is just part of the political process.

I guess that is where we differ, I hardly consider big government a single issue and yes compromise is a big part of the political system; but government is there to govern not control and dictate. They are not listening to the will of the people.

The government, both in size and expenditure, has bloated under the Bush administration. Plus, now we're involved in a war in Iraq from which there is no graceful exit and there is definitely no way to win it, not to mention staggering under the weight of 12-20 million illegal immigrants. I say let the Democrats have a shot; they certainly can't ** things up any worse than Bush has. I think Democrat candidates realize they can't win if they support a blanket amnesty, and I don't think any of them are dumb enough to try at this point though I am betting all of them were hoping this wouldn't be an issue for the 2008 election.

Since it can't be the Mavs, let it be the Spurs!

Well...if it's what you wanted, then congratulations!

With over a year to go before the Republican candidate is chosen, it's a bit early to declare a winner.

Certainly we shouldn't encourage schools to become homogenous, standards-wise - but the issue with the 11 plus is whether a written exam (actually the first written exam I ever took in my life) at age 10-11 is a good test of someone's ability. I remember going into (and out of) that test with a sense of bewilderment over it - its not like with the GSCEs and A-Levels where the whole focus of your school year is (should be) cramming for your exams and learning the stuff that's going to be taught. As I recall (it was nearly 20 years ago) we had maybe 2 weeks prep time, if that.

The other side of it is that I lived with a half mile of the 2 grammar schools in our town - yet I was given a place at a school over 3 miles from my house. Got out of there with 6Bs, 2Cs and 1D - As I said, I wasn't a slacker either; and I honestly believe that my high school academic grades were negatively influenced by the school I was assigned on the basis of an arbitrary 30 minute test.

That didn't make as much of a difference to me as I was able to made up for it in higher education; but in my dad's generation that would have been much. As I said back then that test essentially determined your net income for the rest of your life.

The 11+ is more of an intelligence test than anything, sort of like the old-style American SATs, which could be used in place of standard IQ exams to join Mensa. As far as I can tell it's not the kind of test you can really study for, but like the SAT you can be coached on test-taking strategies. Middle class children tend to perform better on the test than working class children, but that doesn't mean that the system should be done away with.

I think that perhaps children should have another opportunity to join a grammar school; the 11+ shouldn't be the only chance you get, but I cannot fault a system that gave my husband an education for free that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds at a private school. The real problem is not with the grammar schools but with the kids cast aside by the system; they seem to be thrown into comprehensives and ignored. Clearly this is not fair to them, but with such limited resources you have to prioritize the kids who are most likely to be helped by what you have to offer. This sucks for the kids who fall just short of the standard.

I'm assuming those grades are for your GCSE/O-levels and not your A-levels; the phenomenon of taking more than a handful of A-level exams seems to be more recent.

I don't know when you went to school but I don't know anyone here in the UK now who laments their position in life and says, "boy, I wish I'd aced my 11+!" My husband was born in the late 1960s so he encountered the UK state school system in the 1970s and early 1980s; he got his BSc in 1988. I DO know people who were born into poor working-class families who passed their 11+ exams, went on to uni, and have moved out of the working class and into the middle class. They credit the grammar school with giving them that social mobility.

We don't have a universal curriculum or a national exam in the USA, though education at the secondary level is pretty similar from state to state. We were lucky in Dallas to have the magnet school system, including what is acknowledged as one of the best...if not THE best...public high schools in the country. The most capable children are chosen from a massive pool of applicants and the school is kept as racially balanced as possible, so it is not 100% middle class white children. That's as close as we got in Dallas to a grammar school, but the Talented and Gifted magnet school (or TAG magnet) is an unmitigated success. Just think about what the 200 pupils there would face if we clung to outdated and frankly unfair ideas about 'equality'. There is really no such thing as equality in academics, since all children perform at different levels. Equality in the UK seems to mean throwing children together into comprehensives without any regard for academic ability. This is how things are mostly done in large US cities, and having gone to regular state schools I can say that the more academically-minded pupils did not benefit in the slightest from being put into classes with less academic pupils; all they did was take up the teacher's time and hold the rest of us back. Only in high school were we streamed and sorted into ability-appropriate courses, and it was then that a lot of "average" kids really began to shine.

I think if the UK gets rid of grammar schools and does not offer a similar alternative for the brightest pupils, it will be shooting itself in the foot. There is really no shame in streaming. Some kids will grow up to be lawyers, doctors, CEOs, scientists, etc. Some kids will not. I think it's society's responsibility to direct resources appropriately. I don't see the point in neglecting less able pupils, but equally there is no point in penalizing the bright students for being bright because you don't want to project an elitist image. The UK's obsession with equality is, quite frankly, frightening. This is not to say that the US system is not without its flaws. Clearly it is flawed on many levels...but getting rid of grammar schools and throwing all the kids together in the same building would make the UK system MORE like ours. The UK school system used to be clearly superior to the US system, though it has been slipping as of late to the point where it is only marginally, if at all, better. I think the UK is neglecting its brightest pupils in the interest of 'fairness' and I think this is having an effect on the country's academic achievement as a whole.

Sorry if this seems a bit schizophrenic, but I am a product of US state schools. Plus, it's nearly 11pm.

About 40-50 years ago it used to be said in the UK that the 11 plus exam (which determined which secondary school you would get into after leaving primary school), effectively determined the course of the rest of your life. If you did well and got into the local grammar school you had a good shot at getting becoming a doctor, solicitor or other high-paid professional.

If you didn't - you were essentially condemned to the ranks of the low-wage "unskilled" work force.

I think they've since abolished that particular exam - but when I took it in 1988 my borderline case got me a place at a crappy comprehensive. I wasn't a slacker in school either - and I made the best I could of things at the comprehensive, but I've no doubt that I would have done (a lot) better academically had I got an extra % or 2 on that exam when I was 10/11.

But back in the days when people left school with GCE's (higher education being very much the exception) - an arbitrary exam in your final primary school year could essentially make or break you.

My husband passed his 11+ and got to go to a grammar school. I shudder to think what could have happened to him if he had not. However, I don't agree that getting rid of them is the best way to go. I think the best and brightest should have access to what a grammar school has to offer...definitely.