After jmh’s magicwebcam that’s been the thing that has shocked me the most lately!.
I’m not very glad about the news. As a foreigner I love English for English’s sake. I don’t want it to be ‘tamed’, sometimes I found myself in dire straits with some words or expressions but what are the dictionaries and internet for?.

Because of its promptly -and cheap- delivery I use to buy books at amazon.co.uk but, maybe, I should order them form USA or UK based sites depending on the author’s nationality.

The ‘make-up’ they do is only about titles and spelling?. I mean do they respect slang and localisms?. Those are some of the things I like the most about reading English books.

I’m pretty sure that Spanish books aren’t touched in any way. We spell the words the same way although the pronunciation and even the meaning can be very different. There are very old words and expressions that nobody uses in Spain that have been kept alive in America, another words have evolved to mean different things and newly coined words have grow from different seeds.
Of the second group there’s an example that keeps people blundering continuously. To pick something up in Spain is ‘coger’ and we can use this words hundreds of times a day, in America you are supposed to say ‘tomar’ o ‘recoger’ because ‘coger’ means to have sexual intercourse. I’m remembering an old joke about a Spaniard sending a telegram from Argentina to some friend in Spain.
An example of the last group is computer -ordenador (from French ‘ordinateur’) in Spain and computador (from English computer) in America-.


Juan Maria.