[LINK] Are GUI design standards no longer relevant?

[Fred Pilcher]

Jim wrote:
> If a vowel was spoken differently somewhere it wouldn't be an problem.
> 
> Where a word is pronounced differently in different places, eg, the
> colour maroon rhymes with moon in Scotland and bone in Australia there'd
> be a bit of confusion.  We could work through this problem.

Oh boy - we're going to get into trouble for being so off topic. ;-)

But I'd argue about "marone", which in my experience is strictly used by 
sports announcers.

> When
> writing Italian dialect, there's a question of whether to write the word
> as spoken in dialect - which is actually the more correct option - or
> writing the "standard Italian" word.  They seem to cope.

Whereas we simply use the same spelling and everyone knows what it 
means, regardless of how it's pronounced. We win. ;-)

> Exactly the same question arises in English, for example, when CJ Dennis
> wrote "Er name's Doreen. I seen 'er in the markit first uv all,
> Inspectin' brums at Steeny Isaacs' stall."  Using consistent spelling
> wouldn't change this.

Dennis was describing The Bloke's dialect. If we actually spelled things 
that way it wouldn't have worked - it's because we don't that we can 
hear The Bloke speaking and conjure him and Doreen up in our minds 
*because* he spells the speech differently. Phonetic spelling would lose 
all of that, and what a tragedy that would be!

> As for Afferbeck Lauder's "Airman pickle semmich", that was just
> intended to confuse and thus amuse.  

And didn't it! But he was making a point as well as entertaining us.

I await Tony's roth. Or "rath" if you're an American. ;-)