Posted by Bob Taylor on September 9, 2014, 6:17 am
The other day my wife and I were sitting in the morning room having our elevences of the usual coffee and chocolate biscuits and reading the days papers, when all of a sudden she said, ‘I’ve just been reading the messages on your Armed-Guard site’. ‘Oh yes, I mumbled’ ‘And’ she continued ‘in one the man spoke of his wife canning tomatos, minus the e’ ‘Well It’s like this’ I replied ‘ over there they don’t have their own language and it’s taking time for them to get the hang of English, especially where e is concerned and this has become known as doing a Quayle’. ‘Yes I see’ she said ‘ perhaps also to make English easier for the poor dears they dropped the u in a number of words?’. ‘Quite true’ I said ‘except for the intellectual minority who have retained the u like Nasa for their spacecraft Endeavour’.
Bob Taylor
With apologies to our good friend Gerald Burr. And sorry to hear of your Spinal Stenosis old chum, something like that must be a real pain in the neck.
You have to understand that in the United States when it comes to canning tomatoes (or tomatos), we always drop that extraneous 'e.' That makes the tomatoes/tomatos a little smaller, so we can fit more of them in each jar.