Rated 5 out of 5 stars

by robsku on Jan. 30, 2016 · permalink

I love this dictionary!

English isn't my native language, so it has nothing to do with me being British or anything, nor is it because I was taught (or learned myself - pretty much most of my English language, after 6th grade (I'm not going to confuse us both by trying to figure out what's the closest word for Finnish public education non-optional (well, generally - home schooling is an example of other ways) 9-year school's first 6 classes (we call them roughly translated "lower class" and "upper class", like "Dude, I'm an upper classer, now realize your folly and treat me like and adult which I'm not" :D), because our family bought the first computer in our household in 1991, between 5th and 6th class - while I was bummed that it wasn't a cool Amiga (just 500 would've been cool - my friend got one at same time, and really started learning anything more than gaming on it after he bought a PC, which was in late 90's so it was cool already, and really the only alternative - yes, nobody I know ever even considered an apple back then).
But I learned a lot with that PC - one thing was that although the original OS (IBM DOS 4 + some weird GUI with IBM Works Office Suite, filemanager called dosshell.exe, tutorial and finally, one tile to get into command line - was all in Finnish, less than 1% of any kind of programs weren't - and most commonly they were English only. When my dad got pirated MS DOS 5, the ROM drive, which showed as D: drive, disappeared with all the IBM DOS 4, and from that 'til '95 (when we bought a new 75Mhz Pentium with, uh, Windows 95 (which I loved - I hadn't used enough of Win3.0 on that 286, I hadn't learned to hate it yet), almost everything including the OS was English.
That's why I still today like to configure my OS to english, but my locale isn't set to en_US, it's en_GB. And it's not because how I learned English, because at school they teach us English the way it's in US, and all the programs defaulted to US English.

It's funny how, at least to me, it seems that the whole world (outside Britain I guess) treat US English as the "proper" and "real" English, while British English seems to be treated as "funny variant, like the one Australians speak." That's just nuts, but what it's about for me, a man who probably writes more US than GB English automatically (which is why I wanted this dictionary), is that British English seems more alive to me. That's it to put it simply. Simply and shortly - yes, that's what this definitely was.