[ QUOTE ]
PhotonBoy said:
Do you feel pressure in the last while to drop certain words like hoarding, boot, lorry, torch etc.?
[/ QUOTE ]
No pressure at all! We alternate between lorry/truck, boot/trunk et al. Though we never use the international spellings like 'gray' and 'color'. Flashlight isn't a word most people use though, torch wins out there. I think that might partly be because the equivalent of 'torch' is used in European languages too, and 'flashlight' doesn't translate as well. Also 'torch' is shorter to say and is a word people are familiar with (because most people aren't torchaholics /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif)
[ QUOTE ]
I know in Canada that the spread of tools like Microsoft Word and the mass media are tending to make Canadians use color and flavor instead of colour and flavour, etc.
[/ QUOTE ]
I agree somewhat. Alot f ppl r lrnin2typ realy bdly due2msn & txt msgs. But, overall Microsoft Word seems more than happy to use the English dictionary rather than the International/American-English dictionary. Spellings like 'color' don't seem to be infiltrating our language much really at all. Though, vocabulary-wise, new words enter the dictionary all the time.
I get a bit annoyed that Word doesn't seem to recognise words like 'alot' 'goodbye' and 'aswell'. That confuses me a bit.
Maybe it's our distance?! I think Australians still use the traditional dictionary too.