After being here for a couple of months, I've started to notice all sorts of ways in which Kiwi english is different from North American english. The most obvious difference in spoken language is pronunciation, eg. head is pronounced like heed, backpack sounds like beckpeck, fish and chips is like fush and chups. In written language, spelling is the most obvious difference (colour vs. color, organise vs. organize).

One aspect that's a bit different that I hadn't expected is prepositions. Until recently, I thought english speakers used prepositions in pretty much the same way. Perhaps I should have known better than to assume that, because there are definitely some differences:

New Zealand English	North American English
Not On Service (eg. a bus)	Not In Service
What did you do at the weekend?	What did you do on the weekend?
Call us on 555 1212	Call us at 555-1212
Your balance as at 12:34 is ...	Your balance as of 12:34 is ...

It's easy enough for me to adapt to the spelling here (especially since words such as "colour" are spelled the same way in Canadian english) since I have time to think about spelling when I'm typing, but it's going to take a bit more work to come up with the locally correct preposition fast enough when I'm speaking. Then again, since my accent will likely never be anything close to Kiwi, I would hope my funny use of prepositions will be easily excused.

I maintain the list of how to say "I like to eat nuclear tacos" in as many different languages as possible. I recently updated the list, added romaji (Japanese) and pinyin (Chinese), and added the names of the languages in their own language. The current list is here.

If you can, please check my romaji and pinyin entries, and supply other translations if possible. I can't seem to confirm that the Polish translation is anywhere near close (saluton goulo, bonvole helpu!). The Korean translation was done by babelfish and I can't trust it (the Korean translates back to English as "I eat the nuclear other nose and Sip i increase").

You may have to increase the font size in Firefox on Windows to read the pinyin properly (ctrl-plus). Internet Explorer shows it fine on my computer, but Opera shows some really odd spacing in the pinyin.

At the top of the desired-language list are:

• Hebrew
• Gaelic
• Greek (EDIT: roman letters done, thanks thomasj; need Greek letters)
• Thai
• Hindi
• Persian
• Norwegian (bokmal and nynorsk) (EDIT: done; thanks Sauron!)
• Czech
• ...anything else

Finally, remember that you can order nuclear taco swag at cafepress, including a shirt with all these translations on it!

I just looked over at the little pile of (postal) mail I picked up last night. Sitting on top was some promotional junk from AT&T Wireless. Printed on the outside: "Inside: texting tips 4 U."

Sure enough, inside there were examples like "CAN U', "C U L8R", "2NITE", and so on. Explanatory text says:

Tip: Keep messages short by using text abbreviations. A common example is "C U" for "See you!"

It's true, the annoying phonetic single-letter spelling that has been cultivated in the young computer-using population over the last decade or so, also eagerly adopted by so many non-native english speakers around the world, has now gone mainstream. L33tspeak is now being actively promoted by one of the largest telecommunications marketers out there.

I feel like I'm reading an ad for dating.slashdot.com.

Maybe AT&T is doing this because they've noticed people are sending text messages that are longer than they need to be. Shorter messages mean less network usage means more profit (text messages are either $0.10 each or "included with your plan"). I'm almost certain it doesn't cost ten cents to move less than a thousand bits of information around. Especially when you compare that to a phone call, which is not only higher bandwith but the bits need to move in some semblance of real time. Like the small print says, "There is no guarantee of actual delivery or delivery within a specific period of time."

Perhaps - and this is a harrowing thought - there are now young marketing exectives inside AT&T who were brought up with this sort of monophonetic communication style, and they thought it might be a good idea to try to promote it among the rest of the unsuspecting population.

In any case, such an abbreviated conversation style is annoying. I know I'm not alone.

My pet peeve word of the day is webinar. Presumably this comes from the combination of "web" and "seminar", ie. a presentation about something delivered via the internet. The etymology of the word "seminar" is the latin seminarium, which means "nursery".

Google shows about 243,000 hits for the "webinar" search term. Clearly it has caught on. But why? What makes the presentation delivery mechanism so special that it has to be embedded into the generic name for the event? What do you call a presentation that is delivered both live in person and over a computer network? Or perhaps simultaneously broadcast over two different mediums? (Oh right, that's called simulcast.)

I suspect that eventually people will remember that the medium is not the message, and we can return to calling presentations presentations. The word "webinar" will be relegated to just another entry in dictionaries of obsolete computer terms.