*grumble*

[ratcreature]

I'm really not that picky about British vs. American English in Harry Potter fanfic (a lot of the time I don't even notice, it's not like I could always tell for sure which words belong to which variety), but right now I'm reading a story that I would enjoy quite a lot if Harry wasn't addressing his female teachers as "Ma'am" all the time, which to me sounds really American, and I don't recall it being used in the books at all. I don't have copies of the books at hand (I just borrowed them from my sister when I read them), so I could be wrong, but I don't think so. "Ma'am" to address teachers and such is American, right?

Comments

Re: Miss! Miss! I know!

[dodyskin.livejournal.com]

Huh, really? All of the other German people I know use American spellings except for the bloke I used to live next door to and that's because he's thoroughly Anglicised. I must have just got a weird skew--it's funny how you can do that about countries. I confess, although I have read the HP books I am not a part of the fandom. I like them (although the abbreviation screams 'sauce' to me) and everything but I'm totally esconced in the Buffyverse. I seem to have a fair few HP fans on my reading list though, for one reason or another. Actually I was checking out your journal because you were on a list I joined today called Fanfic Crit or something. I want to learn how to give better critcisms/reviews of fic so I thought I'd join it. All the posts seem to be about LJ which is odd, but interesting. Hello, anyway.

Re: Miss! Miss! I know!

[ratcreature]

It might depend on from where the people are. I'm from Hamburg, and besides this being the former British occupation zone (which made a difference in the school curricula at least for quite some time, like in that lots of schools in the French zone French was the first foreign language and such), there are longstanding close ties to England, and generally British stuff seemed to have a much better image than things coming from the uncouth US hooligans... *grin*

Also the English teacher I had longest actually was an older Englishwoman, who had little tolerance for any US traces in English, that is the only concession she was willing to make was to allow a student who had moved to Hamburg from Seattle and had spent several years in the US school system in both elementary and high school to use American English. But then that student spoke US English more or less as her first language (according to her she spoke it better than Korean anyway), so the teacher could hardly expect her to switch over to British. All my other English teachers studied English in the UK and pretty much agreed in their loathing of the US variant, though there were degrees to that. The worst reaction to using US English (in particular colloquialisms) was kind of like being treated like Neville in potions class by Snape. *g*

About FCA-L (glad you found my LJ btw *wave*), well, the list has been rather quiet, with short bursts of activity, and there isn't a regular criticism thing going on, like a book discussion group or anything like that, so if you just wait for fanfic reviews to appear it most likely won't happen. However if you start a thread about fanfic/fanfic reviews the chances are good people will join in, especially if the fandom isn't too obscure, or if your post is more "meta-fandom" like in general about fanfiction reading and discussion rather than anything very fandom specific. Like you saw with the LJ thread that was also more about cross-fandom trends and such.