Words or phrases that are like nails down a chalk/blackboard

Indeed. This is an international forum with many members from USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Their currencies are $, $, $, $ and $. USD, CAD, AUD, NZD and SGD avoids any confusion.

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My point related to the discussion about UK insurance though. Maybe people in Botswana buy home insurance from John Lewis. :blush:

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Circa prefixed to numbers that aren’t dates, e.g. c.£1,000.

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Circa is just Latin for around or about. What’s incorrect, misleading or otherwise troublesome using it for monetary amounts?

More to the point, what would you rather? ‘Approximately’ is 13 letters, which is inconveniently greater than the two characters of ‘c.’.

Mark

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Frank Lampard’s Everton.:pouting_cat:

Steven Gerrard’s Aston Villa.

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I use the sterling symbol often enough that I’ve memorised the Windows key sequence - hold down the Alt key, then press 0163 on the number pad on the right.

There similar combinations available for lots of other common symbols e.g www.alt-codes.net

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Interesting. I don’t think I’ll move away from GBP though. My decade in fintech, (most at SWIFT) drilled into me that the underlying banking systems don’t actually support or use currency symbols. ISO 3 character currency codes or nothing.

I think if it was sitting right there on my keyboard though, I’d use it. FWIW, alt-0163 doesn’t work on double byte operating systems. That whole alt-codes table all matches to different things. Usually for these characters we tend to go by the hex value; in this case 0x00A0. Though on a Japanese system you can often type the Japanese word for pound ポンド and hit space a few times to get £ . The same can’t be said for more esoteric characters.

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Well, that’s kind of the point.

I was taught that, yes indeed, it is to be used as one would use approximately, however in the context of dates only. Indeed if you search for ‘circa’ it still refers to that usage. However, it seems to have now become shorthand slang for ‘approx.’.

Just find it irritating.

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Yes, character encoding has always been tricky once you go beyond the standard keyboard characters. In the early days of the web, I quickly learned to use proper HTML encoding for things like em dashes; IIRC, the characters between 128 and 159 were the most problematic. But these days, I find that symbols like £ and € work well enough across platforms to be OK for casual use.

Lockstep.

Dropped meaning we have just released, as in ‘Our new season just dropped’ email from outdoor equipment company.

Kool wiv da kids or not?

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A tangent, but how quick have TV journos been to move from “Kee-ev” to Keeve"…?

I assumed that was how the Ukranians themselves pronounced it. Plus it separates, I imagine, the old mental image of the former USSR Ki-ev?

Yep. I believe Kiev is essentially from Russian. Kyiv from Ukranian. Though what little I know fits on the back of a pinhead.

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Deep fake. I mean fer crissakes, it’s either fake or it isn’t.

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Why is no-one able to properly pronounce the word “nuclear”. US presidents seem to have particular difficulty but almost everyone else also pronounces as “nucular”. Uggghh!

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deepfake /ˈdiːpfeɪk /
▸ noun a video of a person in which their face or body has been digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else, typically used maliciously or to spread false information.
Oxford Dictionary

I think that people have started to use this word in a wider sense too. Language constantly changes, so if people simply mean fake deepfake will perhaps drop out of use.

Full SL “loom”.

.sjb

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Sea-change has come to mean a radical or complete change, when the original sea change was very gradual, as in pebbles becoming rounded.

But then, awful used to mean good (full of awe) and still does in the phrase “awfully good”.

And terrific was a scary bad thing, same origin as terrify.

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The phrase next level is starting to annoy me, doesn’t matter if it’s sport, business or entertainment.

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