Some people will tell you that they need a pointy knife for cutting tomatoes but they should try using a serrated knife instead: it's much better.

"Of the five pay-checks I mentioned above, no less than three are rubber-stamped with the words 'death stoppage'. When a miner is killed at work it is usual for the other miners to make up a subscription, generally of a shilling each, for his widow, and this is collected by the colliery company and automatically deducted from their wages. The significant detail here is the rubber stamp."

If you asked a random person what Columbus discovered, what would they answer? Round here I think most people would say that Columbus discovered America. By landing in San Salvador and then Cuba.

By the way, I don't strongly object to people using "America" as an abbreviation for "The United States of America" in contexts in which it is obvious that a country is being referred to, and "American" is even less objectionable in an appropriate context. At the same time, "American" obviously doesn't mean "of or pertaining to the USA" if someone is talking about "American species of conifer" or "American dialects of Spanish" or "American tortilla recipes".

When you say you "never had a serious problem understanding people", do you mean you could understand them when you overheard them speaking to each other? Because that, of course, is the real test of how intelligible their language is to you. They may well speak a bit differently when speaking to an outsider. Also, you may be particularly skillful at understanding spoken English. I feel I have got better at understanding British dialects as I got older and gained experience of them. I was terribly confused by some dialects as a child.

With compulsory education almost everyone today has some knowledge of a standard language besides whatever dialects they have learnt. If you want to find someone who only speaks dialect X of language Y you might have to look in places where Y is neither official nor widely taught, or among very old people who never went to school.

For example, there are spoken varieties of English that are mutually unintelligible, while speakers of different Slavic languages are often capable of having a good conversation by speaking slowly and listening carefully.

In practice the main criterion for being a language as opposed to a continuum of dialects is the degree of standardisation. So an example of something that may or may not be a language might be something like Swiss German (but I'm not an expert so I can't guarantee that's a good example). Another type of borderline case is when you have two standardised languages which differ only slightly, for example US English and GB English, or DE German and AT German.

I think you're right that Cantonese should be (and usually is) referred to as a "language" but the categories "dialect" and "language" are not mutually exclusive. For example, Dutch is both a language (for most purposes) and a dialect of West Continental Germanic (for some linguistic purposes).

https://www.dafont.com/uk-number-plate.font?text=OO01+III

Software that handles number plates needs to take account of this. Not all of it does but the glyphs being identical makes it quite clear where the responsibility lies.

Spring: Mar, Apr, May

Summer: Jun, Jul, Aug

Autumn: Sep, Oct, Nov

Winter: Dec, Jan, Feb

Works for me.

Commissioning a language course might be spare change for some government agency but I don't know whether they're allowed to spend money that way. They might be forced to put it out to tender and prefer domestic bidders or something like that.

If there were just French words pronounced in a French way and English words which came from French and are now pronounced in an English way that would be bad enough but in fact we have a whole spectrum of bastardisation.

Linux?

EDIT: Also Qt, MySQL, SQLite, GIMP (rather unnecessarily), ...