wordsmithing q...

TW,

Thanks for asking.

As we - in the US, UK, AU, CA, NZ, IE - all speak English, ALL ways of spelling certain words are correct. Generally, in Oz we spell Color as Colour. Both are correct in Oz. However, I assume most USA-ians would not know of the differences in some words outside of the country.

How would an Aussie - pronounced Ozzy down here - SAY Adviser/advisor? They would SAY... advize-uh... ad-vy-zuh... advyzuh

For Melbourne we SAY... Melb'n. Brisbane is... Bisb'n or Brizy. Cairns is said... Cans/canz. We like to chop vowels out of words and shorten others and not pronounce all the letters - which is why only an Aussie knows how to say "G'day mate" and have it flow and sound natural. We bastardize better than...

Spelling of Adviser/or... either or will do. Most people who read the word wouldn't have a clue. In fact, I bet you could interchange the spelling through a lump of text and noone would notice.

Michael Ross

Thanks Michael.

Some more q's...

Is it common to also SPELL it Brizy (for short) in written form?

And, in England, more and more biz's are going for the simpler .com, rather than .co.uk. In Australia, is that also true? Is .com accepted as a very good domain name -- maybe even better than the ozzy version of .co.uk (whatever that is)?

Of course, in the US, .com is king above all others. If we have some other extension, we have to sit there and explain (OVEREMPHASIZING) that the name is NOT .com, the RE-emphasize it, etc. -- because it is just ASSUMED the name is .com, unless otherwise indicated.

In fact, if we type in a name without any extansion, our computers automatically take us to the .com version.

Thanks.

-- TW