Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 10:10:31 +0011, Peter Lawrence wrote: > The point is, American English IS a dialect (with sub-dialects). > That's why I put "US dialect". But I, too, was focussing more on > "PITA" than on your conflation of "ass" and "arse", probably one that > arose from misspelling after a pronunciation shift made them sound the > same in US dialect. PML. There are many dialects of American English, as I'm sure you know. There is no "US" dialect as such, although all of the dialects of English spoken in the United States use the same spelling for the words "ass" and "ass" because we say them the same. To us they are one word with two different meanings. However, the four legged beast is almost always called a "donkey" unless we are refering to a Bible story or something archaic. The word "arse" is not commonly used in American speech of any type. We don't misspell it. We use a different word. Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --