I would never have thought that renaming "Young and Innocent (film)" so that it becomes "Young and Innocent (movie)" -- purely for consistency's sake -- would create such a lengthy debate. What you don't take into consideration is that there isn't just a world outside the United States: There are also parts of this planet where ENGLISH is NOT the first language. If you were living in a small landlocked country such as Austria, where I'm writing from just now, you'd be appalled at the sheer number of both English and German words with which you are inundated every single day of your life. We've arrived at a point where three year-olds say "Tschüs" (German, but certainly not Austrian for "Bye") when they leave and "cool" if they see something they like -- all because they have heard it on TV. And now imagine an Austrian saying, "I'm not putting up with this. They are supposed to say "Servus" and "nett" or whatever.
And of course you can call an Austrian made-for-TV Film (which is the German word) a "movie". Where's the problem?
KF
K Forstner wrote:
I would never have thought that renaming "Young and Innocent (film)" so that it becomes "Young and Innocent (movie)" -- purely for consistency's sake -- would create such a lengthy debate.
:-) Welcome to wikipedia. We love to get things right, and we love to discuss every possible angle on things. A lot.
you'd be appalled at the sheer number of both English and German words with which you are inundated every single day of your life.
Perhaps part of the culture clash here is that Americans are completely accustomed to new non-English words, and we just soak them up and keep on going.
Once when I was taking Japanese language classes, the teacher made a point that I thought was interesting. In the United States we are very accustomed to people speaking English badly, with strange accents, etc. I lived in Chicago at the time, a real melting pot of a city, and it was certainly true. Many strange forms of English thrive there among taxi drivers and similar.
But most Japanese people have never heard anyone speak Japanese *badly*. So, allegedly, it is a lot harder for them to understand someone speaking bad Japanese than it is for us to understand someone speaking bad English.
This relates to the current discussion as follows. Some people seem to see the use of 'movie' over 'film' as some kind of enforced Americentrism, i.e. the view that the rest of the world better use the "right" term, which is the AMERICAN term, dammit. But I don't think that's an accurate assessment of anyone's actual attitude.
It's more like, we're completely bewildered that people seem so upset about such a thing. Call it movie, call it film, whatever.
--Jimbo