formerly jayeless@dreamwidth

This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

Today I was registering for a forum, and because the default language of the forum was “English (United States)” I clicked the thingamajig¹ to see what other options I had, and while there were no other Englishes, there were two versions of French. And it’s not unusual for there to be two versions of French, but they’re usually “French (France)” and “French (Canada)” (yeah apparently neither Belgium nor Switzerland have large Francophone regions), not these:

• Français (Tutoiement)
• Français (Vouvoiement)

Really!! This forum had two different language settings for people who want to be addressed as tu and people who want to be addressed as vous. That is amazing. But it couldn’t include any versions of English other than American?!

Seriously, I hope Spanish stuff gives me the option of being addressed as tú or usted. I don’t want to be “your mercy”

PS: This forum was also awesome in that “Southeastern Western Australia Standard Time” was one of the options for timezone. This is not actually a timezone, but is unofficially used in the WA-SA border region because otherwise the time difference is 1.5 hours (2.5 hours in summer!) between the two states, which is kind of ridiculous for not a large distance. 45 minutes (1 hour, 45 minutes in summer) is apparently more manageable. Additionally, the number of people “in” this timezone is estimated by Wikipedia at 200.

1. By the way, according to the ~Chrome dictionary~, “thingamajig” is a word but “thingymajig” (my first guess) is not. Sigh.