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EVERYDAY DIFFERENCES
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EVERYDAY DIFFERENCES |
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Details are different. For example, there is no QWERTY keyboard, but there was still a jumbled-alphabet keyboard layout invented to slow down typists - the KAYWOK keyboard. There is no Sunday opening of shops, and banking remains very old-fashioned by the standards of the real world. Shops are also quite old-fashioned. There are no supermarkets. The various languages of the world are similar to their real-world versions, but also have more than three hundred years of divergence from them. Thus slang, jargon and acronyms are all completely different. For example, military aircraft are known as 'Waravens' and the polarisation of light is known as the 'Good Shepherd Effect'. There is widespread use of Latin and Greek-descended defamatory terms such as 'brevisi' instead of 'shortie', 'plum' (from plumbeus, meaning dull, stupid or heavy) instead of 'dumb' and 'inferner' instead of 'idiot', as well as more French loan words in English than in the real world, and other different loan words in the various European languages. Young man have a tendency to refer to their friends whose names start with the letter 'I' as 'First', because of the initial being the Roman numeral for one. Because of the existence of a smaller number of large European nations, many local European languages and dialects have been absorbed into or replaced by the national tongue of that country. Scientific and engineering units are also different things as different people named and discovered things, and they use different basic measurement systems. Inventions also have different names. For similar reasons the controls of vehicles are entirely different to their real-world counterparts, to the point that one would have to learn to (for example) drive all over again if travelling from one world to the other. The same is true for the laws of the road (as well as other laws). Although the physical laws by which the vehicles operate are the same, the way specific types of vehicle are controlled is down to the designers of those vehicles, and is thus essentially arbitrary. Because of the less advanced science in this world, the number of known chemical elements is lower here than in the real world, and their names are also very different. Because there have been no Napoleonic Wars, many nations, particularly the Dutch and Swedish, still have patronymic surnames. That is, the surname of a person is the first name of their father with an extra 'sson' or equivalent added to the end. Sports such as cricket, football, rugby, tennis and so on are played, but their rules are significantly different to those of the real world. With no French Revolution, there is no metric system (and with no Napoleonic wars, also no baguettes). All nations tend to use their various traditional measurement systems. There is no internationally agreed system of measurements analogous to the real-world S.I. system. Given the minor status of Britain in this world, there is also no Greenwich Meridian. Instead, there are two major prime meridians, one running through Paris and one running through Boston. The latter is only used by the New Commonwealth, while the former is used by the Octuple Alliance, its allies, and most other nations in the world. Because of the different history of this world, and thus the non-existence of Luke Howard in it, cloud types are named and classified differently here than in the real world. Anti-Semitism is not discredited, as there has been no Holocaust. Music is very different to the real world. The classical music of the European Powers is not too dissimilar to their real-world equivalents. Popular music, with a very different history to drive it, is thus very different from anything in the real world. Without a Theodore Roosevelt, there are no teddy bears in this world, although there are stuffed toy animals. The World in 1996 | The New Commonwealth | The Octuple Alliance | The Rest of the World Go to the Puritan World Timeline, Science and Technology, Society or Differences Pages. Back to the Puritan World Home Page.
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