Why do circuit breakers go up for on and down for off?

Turnwise and Widdershins? Yes the latter is a genuine word.

Fred and Rose West said exactly the same thing.

Some use the word yous for the plural. I used to say 'you too' when asking the parents what they planned to do when together and for some reason my stupid step mother didnt like that phrase.

I didn't mean that. I meant when two different words are used in some languages like german for people who are familiar to the speaker or not.

How did you find english ? It can be a bizarrely complicated language for some like a mate of mine who while being turkish/kurdish, spent his entire school time in australian schools. They did speak their own language at home and his mother has almost no english at all. His dad isnt too bad at all.

I do almost all their govt forms because they don't know what words like spouse mean.

Initially, difficult. Then, easy. It is an easy grammar. Spelling is just memory, I never learned any rules. I either know the word or not. Pronunciation was more difficult: there are many vowel sounds that are hard to get (we simply can not hear the difference: for example, "oil"). I can hardly guess right how to pronounce a new word.

That is interesting.

AFAIK the double pole switching need not be at the CU but can be installed at the charger end.

You may have a requirement to have RCD protection for the cable to the charger inside the CU (say the cable cable from the CU to the charger is buried less than 50mm behind the surface) but you have to be careful what type of RCD you use for this. Usually a type A RCD will be OK.

Yeah, I have always maintained that the poms particularly pronounce some stuff wierdly, so they can instantly work out who are unspeakable foreign devils. Particularly words like Cholmondeley, pronounced chummly.

Exactly. I wonder whether one manufacturer designed his fan blades for rotation in a certain direction (let's say clockwise) and then all other manufacturers followed suit, rather than some deciding to buck the trend and designing blades for rotating anti-clockwise.

Is it like Dutch windmills were all designed to rotate (I think) anti-clockwise, and this means that most modern wind turbines rotate that way?

And Latin has no word for "child" or "children" (of unspecified gender): you have to say explicitly "boy" or "girl", or "boys and girls".

Yes, that is/was the distinction between thou (familiar) and you (formal) - the exact same distinction as between tu/vous and du/Sie, although vous and Sie can both mean you (plural) as well as you (formal). English probably could do with a plural form of you; the distinction between familiar and formal is less important.

Yes, I imagine that the lack of gender and the lack of word-ending agreement, and the separate "little words" (prepositions, articles, pronouns) as opposed to conveying those things in word endings - all those are things that probably make it easier. English is probably an easy language to *speak* (when you can use a subset of the vocabulary) but a hard language to *understand* when people use unusual vocabulary or make subtle distinctions between words and/or phrases which might be the same in another language.

Pronunciation is definitely weird. Cholmondley and Featherstoneshaugh (Fanshaw) are beyond weird. Leicester, Gloucester, Bicester are weird but it's an easy rule to learn - but as usual there are exceptions: Cirencester is pronounced as-spelled (Siren-sess-ter) unlike all the other -cesters. Then there are Chesham Bois and Theydon Bois where the "bois" is clearly from the French for "wood", but it's pronounced "boys" rather than "bwa" (the French way). Do other English-speaking countries have their own place/people names that have non-intuitive pronunciations?

A lot of Native American names that were transcribed by the French and butchered by later colonists can be challenging.

Mackinac and Mackinaw are pronounced the same, but both spellings are in use. By contrast, Sanilac is prounounced "San-i-lack".

Detroit has lost its French pronunciation. A bunch of street names in that city have suffered the same fate.

Kansas and Arkansas don't rhyme.

And a lot of them are just funny, like Kalamazoo, Potawatomi, or Ocqueoc.

Yes, one can learn a limited subset of a language, enough to do things (even professionally), but beyond that there is a lot to learn. Then there is a moment in which there are many little things that make a difference. Including cultural knowledge of the society where one is conversing.

You notice this if you try to read texts that are three or four centuries old, in your own language, because unless you are a scholar you miss the context. The archetypical example in Spanish is Don Quixote. The novel has so much context that you can get editions where the comments and explanations on the side are larger than the novel itself.

For instance, the book I started learning English taught the expression "it is raining cats and dogs". Most of the times I tried to use it, nobody understood it and I had to explain :-D

The installer's standard installation is apparently to use Henley blocks to split the feed between the existing CU and a new, 2-way one, with a double pole MCB in it. They will then use whatever cable is needed to meet the regulations without RCD protection (T&E or SWA).

The charger incorporates its own RCD protection and monitoring of the Earth/Neutral), so does not need one on the supply and no earth rod is needed either. There is no facility for isolation at the charger, unless a separate, weatherproof enclosure is fitted.

In my case T&E was fine, as it runs in the (indoor) electricity cupboard, into the cavity (the cupboard is recessed into the wall, so the back of the cupboard is the outer skin of the wall) and then through the wall into the back of the charger, less than 2' away. At no point is it less than 50mm from the surface, except where it is visible in the cupboard or completely behind the charger.

I preferred not to have the Henley blocks and second enclosure in the cupboard, so I confirmed with them that if I supplied an RCBO (type A, with a C curve), purely for combining the 2-pole isolation and single slot form factor, they would terminate in my existing CU.

In message snipped-for-privacy@Telcontar.valinor, Carlos E.R. <robin snipped-for-privacy@es.invalid writes

English (well, British English) is absolutely saturated with such expressions, and this must mystify and confuse the benighted foreigner.

IIRC, the theme of one of the early Startrek episodes was devoted to understanding the inhabitants of a planet whose language consisted almost entirely of metaphors and the like.

Thee and Thou are still used by some people in Yorkshire.

I don't know any Spanish. I only did French and Latin at school.

English is generally considered very difficult to learn. While it doesn't have the complication of everything being gendered, it has drawn on so many other languages from around the world, retains lots of words or derivations of them from very long ago and has had Latin grammar forced upon it, so much of it is inconsistent, non-intuitive and downright impossible to guess at.

For a good example of pronunciation, see

It already has a couple of informal ones, yous and you-all for yanks.

I used to say 'you two' when asking the parents say where they would be at a certain time etc, but my step mother didn't like that style. She was a rather silly woman tho, hated the use of the word holidays for university students, insisted on vacation for some reason.

We do have one here, 'darl', even when referring to a man.

Always struck me as very odd when I hear it at say a garage sale.

You lot do use 'dear' quite a bit.

We have a lot of aboriginal words, particularly for place names.

Not sure anyone knows how the abos pronounced them, likely nothing like the word we use today, like with Peking, Paris, Bombay etc.

Fark. All those foreign devils who have just hanged themselves are all your fault.