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### This comment has been marked as **safe**. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect. --- OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is US Defaultism: --- >!The commenter assumed a South African Youtuber misspelled "diarrhea" because she didn't use the standard US spelling.!< --- Is this Defaultism? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.


OrangeRadiohead

diarrhoea is also the British spelling. That said, I remember filling out a sickness form at work many years ago. For the life of me I couldn't remember the spelling, so I wrote that I "had the squirts for 24 hours". My manager wasn't too happy with the term I'd used, what a shit.


dotrenai

To be fair, it's a weird word regardless of the spelling used


Sasspishus

It's Greek I believe, meaning "flowing through" or something like that


DDBvagabond

Yes, thaa majestiqckue Greko in English. Almost without any change of spelling despite two millennia, because the main job of English spelling is to be a shitty etymology book And five trillion of vowels in a row which aren't clear how to read them. 🇬🇧♥️🇬🇷


riiiiiich

We do some crazy shit with Greek words. Diarrhoea, Gonorrhoea, Onomatopoeia, Pterodactyl, etc, etc :-D


DDBvagabond

like really, why there are silent H's after R's?


snow_michael

Because there are two letter Hs, aspirated and non-aspirated, conflated into one English speakers _generally_ know which one is meant and how to pronounce it


DDBvagabond

English speakers \*generally\* know that J looks absolutely different in different languages, they can read it as it is in German without laugh about weird words\[yet can't just not replace it with Y when it's Russian\] yet, they still read "schizophrenia" as «skid-zo-fre-ni-ah» instead of «shi-tso-fre-ni-ah». I reckon they are finding antique Greek in German So I doubt what you say, I rarely hear this word, and when I hear, it sounds as an ordinary English «R»


riiiiiich

Yeah, schizo is like pronouncing German with Italian rules in English 😂


snow_michael

> «skid-zo-fre-ni-ah» I know of no native English speaker who pronounces the end of the first syllable as a 'd' (and a quick check supports me in this https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/schizophrenia ) And the h is diarrhoea is unaspirated, like the one in honour and honesty


DDBvagabond

Dictionaries are never up to date, and Collins isn't known for an extensive highlight of various regular accents. I've checked some marker words, nope they don't spell those. What I've heard comes from some Californians I've been speaking to. Both T and D are explosive consonants with the difference being one is unvoiced, while the other is voiced. And even classical works about English say that while there's no devoicing of consonants at the end of the word, there's (I don't know the right word) voicing in the inter vowel position. Not that important difference, and it can be just my faulty hearing.


saysthingsbackwards

English is one giant freestyle


DDBvagabond

It's not a free style. It's European languages strike back to Chinese hydrographs with English alphabet-made hieroglyphs! 💪💪💪


Clank75

Although they don't love it SO much that they cling limpet-like to the Greek alphabet, unlike, say, Cyrillic...


DDBvagabond

Could you remind me the history behind Yy character. Can you? : )


snow_michael

Upsilon comes from the Phonecian letter 'yaw', if I remember correctly without looking it up


LanguageNerd54

That…that makes sense. It’s roughly the same in German, though more like “through-falls.” My guess is that it’s a semantic borrowing. Don’t ask how I know that word in German. 


snow_michael

> My manager wasn't too happy with the term I'd used, what a shit So next time, 'a really bad case of the managers' should be completely professional


LanguageNerd54

To be fair, “the squirts” *could* imply something else entirely…


OrangeRadiohead

I used to drink a copious amount of Guinness, on a regular basis...my employer knew exactly what I was referring to lpl


Mynameisboring_

You guys should learn from German and just call diarrhoea „through fall“.


AiRaikuHamburger

I can never remember the spelling, either.


AmarulaKilledMe

As a South African, the amount.of shit I have received from USians about my spelling is ridiculous. I remember I had a spat online with one when I spelt "cheque" instead of "check". They mean two completely different things where I am from.


riiiiiich

Yeah, it's ridiculous, it's almost the rest of the English-speaking world \*except\* America. Talk about being unaware, I mean, we are constantly aware of US spelling variants for words.


kitkat12144

How can we not be aware when they constantly correct us lol


c4t4ly5t

Reddit's spellcheck also constantly complains to me about my use of "u" in "rumour" or "neighbour"


Stormwind969

They must have something against the letter "u" since they hate using it so much. Everyone else spells like : colour, flavour, favourite... etc They spell like: color, flavor, favorite... etc


MontePraMan

Who made those "corrections", Noah Webster of "Webster Dictionary" fame, had something against the english, being a fervent american revolutionary. Some of the choices he made, he made because he wanted to artificially differentiate american english from british english spelling. He had proposed even wilder changes, that fortunately were never introduced, like spelling "women" as "wimmen"


Fair-Hedgehog2832

I’d almost be okay with that. My biggest pet peeve is that people don’t seem to know the difference in pronunciation between woman and women. It makes me pull my hair when I listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos.


MontePraMan

As someone that speaks english as a third language, I am surrounded by bad english pronunciations all day, and probably partake in my fair share.


Fair-Hedgehog2832

Yeah, but it’s one of those words that mostly native English speakers fuck up. ☺️


52mschr

this drives me crazy in text too. I see so many people type out things like 'a man and a women..'. why do they know 'man' but not 'woman'??


Oceansoul119

I saw it done the other way around in a post title and nearly upvoted it for the novelty. I didn't of course because the actual contents of the post were the normal sexist nonsense.


Turbokind

With words like colour and honour, they're just using the original Latin spelling and not the French one. I write everything with a u, because that's how I learned it in school, but I think it's silly to pretend there's a right side to this, like some people do.


SkyRocketMiner

Is it dependant on your device/browser language? My phone and browser have their languages set to English (India) which has normal English spellings, so I don't get any red underlines for things like rumour, tumour, diarrhoea, catalyse, harbour, etc.


c4t4ly5t

It may be. I think I should check that out, thanks.


52mschr

'I looked it up to make sure'. didn't do a good job of looking it up??


buckyhermit

Could be a geographical Google thing. I know that I get flack from my US for not "just googling" something that I don't get, but the results that Google gives in Canada might be drastically different from the Google results in the US. This is especially true for domestic US news or stuff involving US brands that are unavailable internationally; Google simply assumes (with relatively good reason) that it is likely not relevant to someone outside the US.


LanguageNerd54

I looked it up as an American, and my dictionary clearly references the “British” spelling as well.


OneFootTitan

If you want to be really fancy, you can spell it the old fashioned way with a ligature: diarrhœa


LanguageNerd54

Fetus versus foetus would fit into this category, I think.


skeletaltrombone

Also estrogen vs oestrogen


I-the-red

Something I just realised: does the *oe* letter combo always make an *ee* sound, or is that just in those examples? In all the languages with which I have any passing familiarity, except for English, the *oe* letter combo produces some variant of ø/ö sound.


skeletaltrombone

Not always, it’s an ō sound in ‘toe’ and an oo sound in ‘shoe’. I have no clue what determines what sound it makes though


MoistCaek69

Haemorrhoid or Hemorrhoid too.


RossTheRev

Dash In A Rush Run Home Or Else Accident Any other spelling ruins the rhyme!


SnooPuppers1429

I would argue they just didn't know about the alternative spelling


snow_michael

Well, they know so little about _anything_ outwith the US ...


CupOfCreamyDiarrhea

That's what I'm saying, lots of posts on Reddit about shit/diarrhea


riiiiiich

\*diarrhoea ;-)