When I attend tournaments and Congresses, I have to show my salesman's face, being pleasant to all and sundry, in the hope of making sales of the GoGoD database. However, at home I can sometimes let my natural grumpiness take over.

When I was working for a living, I used to send out to a number of offices a quarterly newsletter on personnel management, but found that a remarkable number of the managers it was sent to did not read it or took no notice. In our office, we had a saying that we should really send it in Swaheli, to force them to translate it back into English, so that they would then definitely read it. All this is a lead up to the fact that, on our webpage, we had a statement that said "All prices are inclusive of postage and packing." In the past couple of weeks I have received emails from around the globe where each customer has looked at that statement and said that it couldn't really apply to them and that I would need to charge them more. Now I obviously missed a trick and should have charged them for the post, packing, bus fare and wear and tear on my shoes, but as you will have guessed, I told them that what we said is what we do; all prices are inclusive of post and packing. But why is it that we have now had to amend our statement to make it even more clear? Cannot people read what we say and accept that we mean what we say? Here endeth the rant of the day.

Best wishes.

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No aji, keshi, kifu or kikashi has been harmed in the compiling of this post.
http://www.gogod.co.uk

The problem is that you are using British English, whereas much of the world speaks American English. Try the phrase "All prices include postage and handling".

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I think what is happening is that most people assume you only mean within your own country, as it's actually extremely rare (as in, you're the only people I've ever heard of that do it) for international shipping to be included in the price of something (speaking as someone living in the US, of course).

Of course, if the customers you're speaking of are all from the UK, then your theory is more likely...

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Why would somebody from England want to use American English? If you're from the Anglosphere, you should not be fazed by English English, and if you're not, then you can't escape the fact that American English is not actually the definitive version of the language.

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American English may not be the definitive version, but it has become by far the most popular version. I'm not saying that this is a necessarily a good thing, merely that it has happened.
If you want to sell to people with a minimum of confusion, you use the language that is easiest for them.

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Why do people have to keep on starting new threads? There are plenty of threads to read already, and we shouldn't need anymore. New threads are just a darned nuisance.

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North Lecale

Two minor points; Java, why not combine all the threads into one, then there would only be one to read. On the topic of US and British English, none of the customers who asked me the question was based in the US, but they were from English-speaking countries.

Best wishes.

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No aji, keshi, kifu or kikashi has been harmed in the compiling of this post.
http://www.gogod.co.uk

If this kinds of stuff gives you grief, just lower your prices by $5 and then charge the $5 for S&H.
Or go on a limb provide alternate prices with and without shipping so people can chose.

World is full of strange people... lol

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

The received wisdom is that you sell in the language of your customers.

Thinking that everyone who is familiar with US English would understand everything in UK English is ludicrous. I taught EFL for 8 years, and the number of confusing expressions is legion.

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You taught EFL to Americans?

Are you serious? No, I taught in France, mostly, and in Norway for a year.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

This may give a false impression to the many L19 readers who are not native speakers of English.

Yes, it is possible to make a long list of UK-US differences. I think most of us would probably know almost every item on the list anyyway, but in practice these words have very little impact on discourse. A bigger problem for an adult, in any country, is understanding the local teenage slang. Also, though it's faded away now with the rise of national television, I had much more of a problem when I was young because I was brought up speaking a northern dialect (not just accent) that poncey southerners found impenetrable. I'm sure that sort of thing was the same in the USA, too.

For a more realistic view of the current situation, I offer this: when I was on holiday in the USA recently, I took my Kindle which has a copy of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Possibly because of my dialect upbringing I find I have no problems at all in reading ME fast. But that is not to say I know every word, and on a couple of occasions I looked up a word on the internet. In the course of doing this, I came across a site run by a Harvard scholar, Larry D. Benson. He rather impressed me, so on my return I bought a copy of The Riverside Chaucer he edited (so much for saving money with the Kindle!).

Although he was evidently American (as the D. indicated), the book was published in England by the Oxford University Press. Because I have been in the reverse position (writing in British English for the US publisher Slate & Shell), I started to wonder whether they had edited his English into British form. I decided to let the text tell me. I read for about 15 pages of dense text (about 1,000 words a page) before I found the answer. When it came it was the spelling "labor", and not actually a different word or grammatical usage. In fact, of differences of the latter two types there appeared to be none, even in the subsequent text.

I presume this is a slightly freakish result, probably because he was writing about a topic that has no modern cultural differences. But it accords with my own experience of how little difficulty there is. I've always regarded the old saw about "two countries divided by a common language" as one of the daftest sayings ever. The real divisions are cultural.

I've had problems in the USA when asking for "white coffee". In some cases the look of astonishment is so strong that I've wondered whether the word "white" has become the w-word in pc-land. But when I explain that I want coffee with milk in it, I usually get a remark along the lines of "oh, you want half and half". To which I say, "No, I want milk, please". What I then normally end up with is a cup of coffee and a large pot of milk, which is at least much better than being given fiddly little mini-pots full of some indeterminate white stuff. That to me is a cultural difference.

The reason I cleave to my own version of English is simply that I write more fluently in it. If I tried to write in "American" I think I'd soon sound odd, like the non-natives here who try to use slangy phrases like "What the heck". And because I often choose to write in a fairly colloquial way by way of entertainment, editing from one form to another doesn't work very well.

No, it's not just cultural. At times, single words can be a problem. I came across one yesterday. Apparently, in the tech industry in the UK, they speak about "shifting" products. In US English, we would say "shipping" or "moving," for the number of units of a product that is sent to stores but not yet sold.

I have been watching the TV series Ashes to Ashes recently. The very last line was: “A word in your shell-like, pal." I had absolutely no idea what this meant, and even when watching, had to go back and turn the subtitles on to even understand what words they were.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

EFL- would you Adam and Eve it?

Shell like = shell like ear... cockney slang.

Regarding the actual terminology that causes the problem for Mark. It's worth looking at what others do when they are targeting people from more than just the UK. For example, the Book Depository, whose prices include free shipping, use the following:

"Free delivery worldwide on all our books."

I think Mark's "postage" is sort of clear, but "packing" is certainly not a word US English speakers are familiar with. In US English it's "shipping and handling," though I've always felt that the word "handling" - like "packing" - is superfluous. Does one really expect to have to pay for an envelope or box?

But the Book Depository's choice of "delivery" is probably the most understandable choice.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Two examples don't make a trend, but I don't think these count anyway. Cockney rhyming slang has a local cultural basis, and gives many Brits problems as well, though "shell-like" is one of those that seems well known.

And in the case of shift, the meaning you attribute is either wrong or unusual or it's a usage unfamiliar to at least this Brit. Shifting products in normal usage just means selling, though is restricted to people like shopkeepers, so is again part of a local culture (commerce). E.g. "Christmas shopping really began today - I shifted 20 new plasma TVs at a grand apiece." If it's a wholesaler passing goods on to a retailer, the idea is still selling, to my shell-like.

I was teaching one of my grandsons his first rhyming slang words the other day. It was interesting how he found some very easy (apples and pears for stairs), some were easy but ambiguous (mince pies, pork pies) and some left him bemused even when explained (butcher's hook, trouble and strife). I didn't try him on things like boatrace, and certainly not berk, but this language is still alive and evolving. The famous show Minder had lots of new examples.

Other countries have equivalents, and they are nearly always meant to be a secret language. Japanese gangsters like to reverse syllables (do-sa for sa-do, i.e. exile), and a few examples have crept into go and shogi.

Going off a slight tangent (but still grumpiness), I tried a new US show yesterday called Bones. It was very slick and funny, but it had one feature that I find very annoying. In the same way that a go board (or chess board) often crops up in tv shows as a cipher for "this person is very intelligent", there seems to be a similar item in the American manual of standard acting techiques which clearly recommends speaking very fast to show you are intelligent. Since I find it hard enough to hear anyway, this is intensely irritating to me for that reason alone, but also it doesn't correspond with my experience of real life - even brainy people hum and haw, and if they do speak at high speed they are apt to be regarded as too clever here (i.e. potential nutters). In contrast, the upper class British gent educated at Oxbridge may speak with an exaggerated drawl to signify his origins and education (and that's pretty irritating, too).

Criminal Minds was a program that featured both a go board as a big-brain cipher and actors speaking supernaturally smoothly and fast - and I hated it, even though I'm usually a sucker for cop shows (The Wire is why I went to Baltimore).

It should be painfully obvious to the average US English speaker what is meant by "postage" and "packing".

But perhaps Mark and John could take the stereotypical quality of the US American education system into account -- and draw a picture.

i totally agree. i am one of people who e-mailed TMark before purchasing my copy of GoGoD and i think i understood all used phrases perfectly (my English is a mixture of school British English and movie and internet American English), but i really missed the word "worldwide", which now makes the text absolutely clear

unfortunately i encountered shops pretty much hiding their shipping price more often than i saw shops saying it's free and meaning really free internationally

PS: good job, John and TMark, thank you for the GoGoD

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Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

You pedo bears

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North Lecale

I find British writing to be perfectly intelligible, but I do have some trouble understanding spoken British in movies or TV shows (or Irish or Scottish for that matter). I've heard that the UK has a much wider range of pronunciations and dialects than the US, in spite of having fewer people over a much smaller geographic area. Maybe something about the immigrant effect caused American pronunciation to grow relatively uniformly?

I grew up in Texas, and sometimes people are surprised that I don't sound like the Texan stereotype. I think between film & TV and the amount of travel people do these days, most city Americans sound pretty much the same. For people in the smaller towns, the sound is more noticeable, although still not as pronounced as it's usually portrayed on television.