TIL about 1 million liters of urine is spilled onto the bathroom floor every day in the U.S.
1y 2mon ago by lemmy.ca/u/Quilotoa in til from www.livescience.com
Researchers have come up with two new urinal designs to prevent the spillage of "ill-aimed pee."
I have to imagine that a fair amount of that is intentional. Some people are just pigs.
Two things that rattle around my brain constantly:
- Leave it better than you found it.
- Be mindful of the work you leave for others.
Those don't even come to my mind, I live them without thought.
OK, sometimes if a thing is a PITA I'll think, "Crap, can't make someone else do it."
OK. Well you're better than me. ✌️
Nah, not better. You will eventually stop thinking about these things and they'll just happen.
I do but the mindfulness is a feature, not a bug.
For a while I worked for a shitty little marketing company that had, shall we say, a high frequency of narcissistic traits among the C suite. The men's room in that office was the worst I've ever seen in terms of there always being puddles of piss on the floor.
Also, a very large majority of the execs didn't wash their hands when they were finished.
I’m struggling to find sources for this but I’d love to learn more. Anything you can share?
I'm pretty sure they are either making shit up or regurgitating something that was made up by someone else. Most bad habits that people attribute to some personality disorder is just nonsense and you can fairly easily disregard it. It's like the asshole that says they're OCD because they think it means you're a little quirky.
Fuckin’ Thomas Kinkade
I can’t explain the psychology behind it, but this really simple design technique apparently still works.
Apparently some men need a reason to aim, and will continue doing so even after they realize they’ve been bamboozled.
*some men...it's pretty difficult to miss the bowl when seated lol
Yeah, but there's plenty of women who don't want to touch the toilet seat so they hover over it and get it dirty as a result.
Ironic isn't it? It would have been fine if everyon just sat down. Just whipe the seat with a cleaning tissue first if you don't trust it.
The waste (╯°□°）╯
DOGE needs to fix this.
The researchers suggest that if Nautilus was to replace the 56 million urinals across the U.S., around 1 million liters of urine would be prevented from being splashed onto the floor every day. Assuming that the volume of water needed to clean up spilled urine is about 10 times that of the volume of urine, about 10 million liters (2,199,692 gallons) of fresh water could be saved every day, the scientists said.
The widespread adoption of these urinal designs "would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility," the researchers wrote.
They should drop everything and do this first thing.
Assuming that the volume of water needed to clean up spilled urine is about 10 times that of the volume of urine, about 10 million liters (2,199,692 gallons) of fresh water could be saved every day, the scientists said.
These scientists appear to be working under the incorrect assumption that the urine gets cleaned...
They're also assuming the bathroom floors wouldn't be cleaned regularly if there wasn't urine on them. I'm pretty sure all buildings with a custodial staff mops the floor everyday, bathrooms twice a day. They'd at most reduce cleaning the bathroom to once daily instead if these urinals we're absolutely perfect and no other reason for cleaning bathroom floors existed.
Think of what we could be doing with that urine if we actually invested in recapturing it.
Not sure if youre sarcastic or not (I was), but there has actually been research if the nutrients in urine can be used as fertiliser and I believe the result was positive.
Sit and pee.
Urinals are disgusting.
/European man
I see someone skipped leg day.
I just hover over the seat.
I always forget to bring my scroll of levitation when I go out!
But urinals are so much more efficient both in regards to water usage and time.
They're very efficient at spreading piss all over the place, yes.
Sure pal, and it's not like 90% of men piss standing into a toilet as well, which oftentimes ends up worse than using a urinal.
... and those same men wonder why women find them repulsive.
Sit and pee.
A little bit of piss never hurt nobody.
American here. I've started doing this at home and it's just way more sanitary. No more drops off pissy toilet water splashing around.
When I'm out and about I still pee standing up because public restrooms are filthy.
I sit to pee when I get up in the middle of the night. Don't have to be able to see.
That's a good point too.
… says the guy who wee-wees upside down
Squat and pee.
Sitting and standing is bad.
/Italian man
Pee however you want
Worrying about what other people do when they aren't hurting anyone is fragile
/Master man
Pee in mouth?
/Kinky man
Pee on self?
/Bison man
How the fuck else u supposed to water the trees?
Just turn on the rain, that's all there's to it
In fucking straya? That shit just decides to stop working sometimes.
I used to be in this camp, but will now avoid public toilets whenever possible. Not having to sit on others pee and butt sweat is pretty awesome.
Never not seen a urinal in europe
People might sit more in your country, but I've never heard of that being particularly European.
Hmm, well there's that. So Germany and Scandinavia ranker higher (I'm from Denmark and sometimes sit). I have to wonder how this correlates to a standard development index. It's not unusual for the US to be a cultural outlier on those.
Us poor women gotta sit :(
Well when there are no seat covers, I always lay some TP over the seat before sitting. Or squat without sitting.
First wipe the seat, because people be nasty and leave piss droplets while hovering, then line the TP. Unless there's no toilet seat, then it's hover time.
Are you German? They’re famous for their sitzpinklers
Love that word/anecdote! It’s a good example of a German compound word but it’s also one of the silliest examples of male identity gatekeeping I’ve heard of.
Is there a third to wipe?
LEG DAY EVERY DAY
It's because people stand too far back from the urinal, and then shake it like they are trying to kill it. Get in there, and then finish with a gentle squeeze or two and you won't splatter everywhere.
Or, instead of that, pee sitting down.
Zero spillage.
Meh then you wasting like 4x the water.
If its yellow let it mellow. Not for too long though.
I once saw a road stop urinal that had a step that forced you to get to the right distance. Genius and simple.
Just thinking how many times I use a urinal a year, multiply by population, the only way this makes sense is with some number of people just pissing onto the floor.
I can't speak for the whole country but where I work people really do just piss on the floor.
THIS IS WHY
If we could all be civil and just sit down to pee, the world would be a better place.
Yes I've been saying this for at least 20 years. Toilets are for sitting and urinals are for standing. My wife also appreciates this.
The problem is: This only works if EVERYONE does it. The second anyone breaks and gets a few drops on the toilet seat, it’s over. Because that is part of the reason we stand in the first place. We know how gross we are, and if you can see the gross it validates that.
I hate society 😔 lmfao
You never worked in a school I guess.
It's 0.003 liters per day per person
you suck at math
So you think the average person uses a public urinal more than 365 times a year? Also about half the population sit.
I didn't write the article :)
If you're angry about the math comment, bust out a calculator. You could have reached that verdict yourself.
A calculator isn't going to tell me how many times a year I use a urinal.
About three times per day during the work day makes for ~800 times per year. Seems to be on the right order of magnitude to me.
My biggest issue is stream strength. I have issues peeing and often dribble or have a split stream.
Yes I've talked to my urologist about it. Several in fact.
No it's not my prostate. No it's not a weak pelvic floor.
I've been suffering with this for almost 20 years and docs still don't know what's going on.
Sorry about the narrow urethra, Hank.
How about just sitting down on the toilet? Don't get me wrong it's great you got it checked out but sometimes there are pretty simple solutions.
I knew a guy in high school that absolutely refused to sit to pee. Said every time he had to shit he would stand to pee than turn around and go.
Some men are just insane
What was his reasoning?
Said only females and cripples sit to pee
Yep, that's about as insane as I was expecting, lol.
I asked him if he ever cropped dusted himself by accident and everyone laughed when he hesitated
Sitting down isn't always feasible. For example, the bathroom in my house has a round toilet bowl and my cock doesn't fit. The bathroom is too small for an elongated bowl.
I use a cup for home and at work I just do my best.
I have no idea how small your toilet or large your penis is, but what do you do with your penis, when you have bowel movement?
My penis sits on the toilet seat between my legs. It's uncomfortable to put under the seat to pee.
How do you not pee while poopping? I thought all poopoo times were peepee times.
Maybe he does. Where do you think all these liters off spilled pee are coming from?
I will sit when every toilet is elongated enough to not risk rubbing my junk on the rim.
Look at mister two and a half inches over here.
I find split steam is more common after very long nights of sex
Yes....my partner knows this all too well. 😅
I wonder wether they took these kinds of things in account in the research, if it's about collecting to highest percentage of pee possible than I'd argue this matters too. They also say their design is better for children and people in wheelchairs so who knows.
Ultimate solution:
Gotta paint some faces on there, with puckered lips.
Anyone, whether it's man or woman, who pisses or shits or whatever all over a toilet (i.e. not inside) has quite likely never cleaned a fucking toilet in their life.
Source: Have cleaned toilets, not just my own, before - it has changed me.
I mean the dick is sometimes arbitrary, even when you make sure as not to have any foreskin in the way of your urethra.
But if that happens to me, I'm usually courteous enough to take a hit of paper and at least dab most of it away. But if it's a rank toilet with already piss waving on the floor, no thanks. Sorry. Can't help, the amount of toilet paper in one cubicle isn't enough. And usually the places with that level of hygiene don't necessarily have even a toilet seat, let alone several rolls of paper.
I've started sitting to pee, when at home
Story time.
It honestly feels like about 264,000 gallons of that were spilled at a placed I used to work. I still have no idea who the culprit(s) was.
No kidding, the problem was so bad that building management stepped in and... added chamomile scented floor mats beneath the urinals to catch and deodorize the... ugh (gross)... drippings. It was such a strong smell that it wafted out into the hallway with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. This prompted some of the women in the office to remark at how unfair it was that the men's room was obviously getting all this extra attention. I almost can't describe the mixture of disappointment and disgust on their faces once I explained why this was happening.
I also once had to explain to my wife that the above situation, along with the smell of urinal cakes and most gas-station-restroom deodorizers, are the reason why chamomile tea is a hard pass for me.
Should build them as wet rooms, periodically a large shower head sprays down the entire room.
Don't forget to flush the bathroom
Sounds maybe a plumbing problem.
I'm doing MY part!!!
"Would you like to know more?"
I want to know how they estimated that
Do a small test with a single user, take the amount of spillage then times it by the pissing population and average numbers of wees a day.
I love the mental image of a government employee having the job of spilling barrels of piss into bathrooms around the nation
Citation needed.
It is literally in the article: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/8098745
Thank you protestor. I mean it doesn’t even pass the possibility test. 300m people population, 1m litres ≈ 300L per person, per day?
You got your numbers mixed around.
1m liters/340m men = 0.00294 liters per day
That's just under 3ml, which is very little, but still seems high. Assuming that not every man is using only the urinal, the number per urinal usage is even higher. But I also don't know american public bathrooms, are they that filthy?
I'm sure there's one weirdo responsible for ~70m liters, peeing at the floor at every opportunity.
It's not my fault. It just flails around like a garden hose and even with both hands I simply don't have the strength to wrangle that python.
It's only about 170m men, so almost 6ml
Oh damn. I sure did.
It's the opposite, it would be 1/300 L/person/day, or 1L per 300 persons
I do like the Nautilus and wish the designed for everyone philosophy was the predominant one. Especially you get one lower level one put in when they could all be functional for everyone.
"The researchers' Cornucopia and Nautilus designs both achieved a significant reduction in urine splashing, with the Cornucopia performing best. However, the Nautilus was considered the most ideal design due to its height, which would allow shorter people — including children or those in wheelchairs — to more easily use it. Its larger gape would also be easier to clean, and would be more accepting of poor aim, and therefore would also be appropriate for use on boats or airplanes."
Seems like a complete lie. Men might lose a few drops due to the shape of the bowl tops. It's certainly not worth anyone tearing out urinals in the hope some hypothetical piss splashage goes down.
And personally a better goal for urinal design is water reduction. i.e. urinals that use no water, or the bare minimum to flush the piss through.
It’s a little more than 1/2 a teaspoon, per person. Not exactly hard to believe.
Men aren't dumping half a teaspoon of piss on the floor. Adults are capable of aiming and pissing and the only waste might be where piss strikes a surface and droplets escape the bowl - assuming the bowl was terrible and everyone in the nation pissed at the exact angle to cause droplets to achieve escape velocity. It's an absurd generalisation and also an absurd problem in search of a solution.
a better goal for urinal design is water reduction. i.e. urinals that use no water
Don't get me started on those "zero water" urinals. They start to stink and accumulate all kinds of nasty in a matter of weeks. There's a reason we flush all of that stuff down the toilet and into the sewers.
They have them in all the McDonald's around here and I've never noticed any difference in smell. There is a sticker near the urinal saying they save tens of thousands of litres of drinking water per year which I can believe. I think the system has some kind of valve and siphon to prevent smells.
They are fixing a problem that has already been solved. There are already urinals that take this into consideration. The problem is not in the design, it is the implementation. For some reason everybody everywhere installs those awful American Standard urinals that are specifically designed to splatter pee onto your pants.
For some reason
$$$
I recall one place I worked. There was a "ofd" older gentleman. I was in the restroom with him at a urinal. He went to the paper towel holder, grabbed about 5 pieces, folded them, and then proceeded to wipe the inside of the urinal out. After he finished, he put the paper towel into one of his back pockets and peed, I think. I didn't stay to watch him finish. I just exited the bathroom and didn't look back.
You mean "OCD?". Because that a pretty brutal example of the reality versus the fiction of it.
Just... Sit down. Shit in the urinal.
Someone went to college to figure this out
lmao
In space, no one can hear you pee:
where does all the p go captain? 🫣
It gets recycled. Water is expensive to get to space and most their food is dehydrated.
For context: everything that goes to space is worth it's weight in gold... So a liter of water is worth ~$60k
But nothing has any weight in space.
If you're going to try ackshually-ing, you could at least be right. Even if you presuppose that "weight is force" (which, frankly, is one of those distinctions that people love to parade around to make themselves sound smart, but generally ignores historical, lingual, and legal contexts), objects in LEO are still attracted to earth with about 90% of the force they would be on earth's surface.
Unless you're one of those loons who only call the reaction force of a static system weight, in which case may God have mercy on your soul.
Maybe the phrasing "nothing in space" was off, but I didn't mean anything close to planetary orbit.
That said, you seem to have a chip on your shoulder about the definition of weight for some reason, and I'm kinda curious about that.
Its part of the P - drive jet propulsion system.
Most of it is in my bathroom when my father-in-law visits.
I seriously doubt this number, as it's roughly 7ml for every male in America. I recall from chemistry classes that there are about 10 drops of water in a ml, so that's 70 full-size drops - or a lot more small droplets - hitting the floor during a day of peeing a few times. A lot of it would land on the front of our pants, so it would be super common for guys to have pee liberally splattered all over our pants. That just doesn't happen, unless maybe you did something weird like pee straight at a tile wall. The only way this could be true is if there are a significant number of guys who deliberately pee on the floor. Anybody wanna fess up?
It's more like 6ml (264172/166100000 gallons), and considering the average man produces between 800 and 2000ml per day, that's like a 0.5% spill rate.
Also it says nothing about the rate being evenly distributed over the days, it could be that the average guy spills a fraction of a liter in one slip up every couple weeks, not 6ml every single day. Plus the young and elderly likely throw off those averages.
Lastly, your assumption that most drops go on the pants ignores the whole point of the new design this article is about: the splashback. They claim most of the urine that misses a urinal splashes out in microdroplets.
I quit caring a while back so I could be driving up the numbers.
And I know the employee bathroom where you can find it.
I know I, for one, was concerned about all this wasted piss, and I'm glad there's a team of scientists looking into a solution.
Just bring back the old floor mounted types
Now its all over my shoes.
Which bathroom floor?
Oh yeah, sorry about that.
I'm skeptical about this.
There are like 170M dudes
And say each pee is about 300ml
Then 1 in 50 dudes needs to have a full pee on the floor every day.
Ok maybe that's a bit more believable
If you include the outliers that are incontinent, it makes up for the folks who skip a day or two of floor-pissing.
Lol there's a sentence I never thought I'd type.
It probably includes the nearly microscopic droplets that spray out of the urinal.
Have you ever had to clean public restrooms? Nothing microscopic about the drops of splashback.
I wear shorts, I already know!
As you get older it's no joke what kind of medical conditions can make something so simple end up being so difficult. 1/50 is not even a stretch.
I'm also dubious on how the number is arrived at.
5ml per man per day misses target.
I personally estimate 85% is from the troughs at Fenway.
The Cornucopia looks like it'd be hell to clean
I saw that name and design and wondered what in the hell that was.
FFS, just let me pee directly into a drain pipe that goes into the wall. I don't need this fancy art piece as a piss middleman.
Thank God it's not all at once.
Pee Tsunami!
It's all me. Sorry. I'll work on my aim.
I'm doing my part.
Edit: Oh fuck, someone else made the same joke as me. Oh well.
eh, great minds and all that.
Who the heck has counted this?
Spilled makes it sound like someone's clumsily carrying around a barrel of urine throughout public toilets.
Before it was rebuilt in the 90s, the MLB stadium in my part of town just had an open trough along a wall with water constantly trickling down it. No dividers.
I can't remember if the toilet stalls still had doors or not, just that it was the foulest rest room I'd ever used until I started working at music festivals.
Been in a pub toilet when a drunk guy came in, whipped it out half way across the room and the dirty fucker started pissing while staggering to the urinal. Just a fucken animal.
Just make the floor sloped into a drain and you don't even need urinals. 🤷🏻♂️
Please don't make troughs become a thing again!
hear me out, the bathrooms at my local Dave and Busters pretty much has it so that the urinals are basically embedded into the wall—so instead of an outie, think of it like an innie—and so really, it takes away the vertical precision needed and just feels more natural... just my 2 cents.
Their research is based on a model like this, the million litre they say is being spilled would be 'saved' by comparing a model like this to their own extra splash resistant design. They say this model has to much backsplash.
How would anyone know that??
I can easily not “spill”. What’s more annoying is the splash damage and I wish researchers find a better toilet design as well to prevent splashing.
Well good news, that is exactly what these researchers looked into.
I'd hate to be the guy that has to mop that bathroom
Now do it for Ireland and measure it in pints.
You can keep it about Americans though.
Does it say which bathroom?
Seeing the amount of micro penis compensating trucks in the US, I'm not surprised
Y'all obviously never heard of the pee cube
Am I the only one thinking what's the big deal? Bathroom floors are usually hard surfaces and have a drain. Im not a urinal user, so take that for what it's worth.
The people who did the research do think it is a big deal, and it might be exactly the reason why you don't use a urinal (although that could also have to do with your body parts, I don't know you).
[...] the researchers wrote in the study. "The use of urinals often results in significant splatter (splashback) as urine splashes upon impact with the urinal generating droplets which travel back onto the floor and user."
This splashback is a breeding ground for bacteria, resulting in bad smells in public restrooms and the potential for the spread of diseases.
"The surfaces of urinals have significantly higher concentrations of bacteria than traditional toilets, with surrounding floors having the highest level," the researchers added.
This high level of spillage of urine requires frequent cleaning, which uses a large volume of water, is unpleasant work for custodial staff and is very expensive.
I don't want to have to stand in someone elses piss puddle while taking a leak or worse yet slip and fall in it.
So pee all over the floor first so it's at least your own piss puddle.
Gotta mark my territory lol.
I used to work at an office where about 200 people shared two urinals, and by lunchtime the entire floor around the urinals would be sticky and brown from the continued cycles of people walking through and adding to the stray spray.
Poor floor
Urine Georg,
Where is this bathroom so I can avoid it?
Clearly somebody has a bladder problem.
That must be a big bathroom!!
The CYBER urinal will revolutionize this, fertilize homeless camps and change life as we know it. Act now!
Dammit, Kevin
And only half that in mop water
Glad that it is not my bathroom floor where they do that....
Where's ye goode olde piss channel?
I'd hate to be the cleaner in that bathroom.
Ya! I know, I'm swimming in it right now!
Hey, America. If you are going to ignorantly continue to use your obsolete and impractical system of measurement in spite of the rest of the would moving on to an objectively superior system generations ago, could you at least spell litres correctly when you fucking use the word?
Liter us how it's spelled in American English. Like centre becoming center, fibre to fiber, etc. Language changes, neither is incorrect.
Americans can decide how to spell gallons. They don't get a say in how to spell litre.
Well, here's the thing with language, it is whatever people who use the language use. If you can spell litre as liter and it's widely accepted, welp, liter is a correct and valid form then.
Also, you spell tire as tyre, you lunatics lol
Litre is an international scientific standard. It's spelling is not up for debate. Why don't you just change It's volume as well, and completely fuck up all scientific communication while your at it.
The spelling of the word, much like any and all words, changes based on how it is used by the people. Standards and definitions follow the usage. It's not about debate, that's literally just language. You can already see this reflected in many sources, such as Wikipedia here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Unit_names
The English spelling and even names for certain SI units, prefixes and non-SI units depend on the variety of English used. US English uses the spelling deka-, meter, and liter, and International English uses deca-, metre, and litre. The name of the unit whose symbol is t and which is defined by 1 t = 103 kg is 'metric ton' in US English and 'tonne' in International English.[4]: iii
or here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litre
The litre (Commonwealth spelling) or liter (American spelling) (SI symbols L and l,[1] other symbol used: ℓ) is a metric unit of volume.
If we're talking about the order the sounds are made, "liter" is more correct. I never understood why Europeans spell the "er" sound as "re". It's just now how the sound works.
My take is that spelling should reflect the sound. In any language. For every word, every time.
American English makes a ton of errors in this regard, you'll get no argument from me there (for example any word with "ough" or "augh" is automatically spelled wrong).
I'm sure tons of other examples in pretty much every language make the same mistake. But as far as I can tell, there is no good reason the spelling shouldn't be a representation of the exact order of sounds that make up the word.
All that to say, even when hearing people who speak all manner of different languages use the word "liter", not one has ever pronounced it "litre".
Honestly it should be more like "ledur" for most Americans. We don't have a habit of the actually making the proper "t" sound very often. But I'm getting into a whole different argument, so I'll leave that kinda rant for a different time.
You're wrong for a multitude of reasons but I can't be arsed to explain all of them in detail
Oddly enough, for as common as the "er" sound is in English, it's linguistically rare. According to the Linguistics Channel human1011, the "er" sound is found in less than 1% of the world's languages, rarer than the click consonants found in some languages in East and Southern Africa.
What's particularly interesting about the "er" sound in American English is that it functions as a vowel sound. Most of us learned that the vowels in English are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, and that's true as far as written vowels go, but vowel sounds are different. In the word "bird," the letter "i" is a vowel, but doesn't make any of the "i" sounds that we learned in school. Instead, the "ir" combine to make the "er" vowel sound. It's called an r-controlled vowel, and we see it in tons of words like "work," "were," "burn," "skirt," etc.
In Finnish it isn't a "litar", it's a "litra", because the r is clearly before the vowel. In Swedish it's "liter", and the vowel clearly comes before the r (the pronunciation being different from the English). But in English, especially American English, you guys use the "er" sound and it's basically a conflation of those two. It's a very rare sound when compared to all languages, but seeing as English is the lingua franca and a lot of it is in American English...
tldr my point is you're being quite ethnocentric, unconsciously most likely, as I assume you don't speak other languages.
What's so fascinating to me is that, while the "er" vowel sound is super rare in languages as a whole, it happens to be in the two most widely spoken languages, English and Mandarin.
No it's conscious.
I probably should have said something about it being true with the languages I've heard more often.
Things like Spanish, French, Italian... Basically things near where American English came from.
I was and am fully aware that other languages will possibly sound different. The way I said it did sound ignorant though. And with the previous reply, I was assuming they were coming from a European POV. All of that was wrong.
Anyway, add in the "in languages I've heard/am familiar with" to that.
I'm aware of the descriptive vs prescriptive concept, but not for linguistics specifically. I've got it open in a tab waiting for my next free moment. I've spent this one replying.
But you were right to call me out about the order of sounds part. I was assuming a bit. I'm not used to phrasing comments for international audiences 😅. Usually I'm talking to people that would share my perspective and familiarities. In my area I didn't run into a lot of people that haven't been from around here. I should get better about this, but changing my own perspective is a challenge. I'm trying.
You're proudly being ethnocentric?
Uh, I don't know many people who boast about being biased, but okay.
I'm aware of the descriptive vs prescriptive concept, but not for linguistics specifically
What? It's specifically a concept in linguistics.
It means that while there are rules to language, there's no one correct ruleset, especially when talking in an international frame. Which would be prescriptive language. Lots of European nations have institutions that prescribe rules for the language, but the rules live constantly as well, and the institutions are all made up of academic linguists who understand linguistic description, meaning it matters more how people use the language and not how it's "supposed" to be used. Although they're probably the type of people who are rather pedantic about language.
I'd like to remind you the nationalist movement is rather fresh, historically, and unified nation-states was pretty much a thing for the last century. But go back a few centuries and there's not a specific single Italian (hell there's debate whether one exists today) French, English, Spanish, Nordic languages, Slavic languages, etc etc. They're all just dialects of their neighbouring ones essentially, except for the Finno-Ugric languages, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian.
You're very biased because North-America is a whole continent and the difference in the style of speech in English in the entire continent is less varied than the language spoken in the area 150 miles around me.
I'm not used to phrasing comments for international audiences
New to the internet, are we? Welcome, welcome.
I just admitted I did that, appreciated you calling me on it, then write a paragraph explaining I'm working on changing it, and I still get accused of boasting about it?
As for the descriptive vs prescriptive part, I've heard of it only as it came up in discussions of another concept (philosophy and religion. They were talking about using one type versus the other as it related to their point, but I didn't know exactly what they meant, because that wasn't what was being discussed directly). So yes, I've heard of it, but no, I wasn't really aware of the meaning of it because the concept at hand wasn't linguistics. Sorry, that wasn't clear. All I was trying to say was that I've heard of the concept, but hadn't learned what it was about yet. That was probably a poor choice of words.
Either way, having read the wiki page for it now, my main issue is that there really isn't (in my opinion) a good reason that any language should ever have a spelling that does not match the order of the sounds used to pronounce the word. Yes, that falls under prescriptive here. This doesn't exactly apply to languages that don't use an alphabet.
You can throw that opinion straight in the trash if you want. But until I find good reasons to think otherwise, that's just a statement of the ideal way to spell, if we were still forming the language.
I mean you acknowledged consciously doing that. If you're working on it, then you take into account perspectives other than your own.
Either way, having read the wiki page for it now, my main issue is that there really isn't (in my opinion) a good reason that any language should ever have a spelling that does not match the order of the sounds used to pronounce the word
Hearing that from an English speaker while my native is Finnish is quite amusing.
https://icaltefl.com/dearest-creature-in-creation/
A few opening verses to demonstrate:
Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer
Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain (Mind the latter how it’s written). Made has not the sound of bade, Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.
Etc.
If you look at the international phonetic alphabet, take an English word, like "geography". And it looks like this: dʒiˈɒɡɹəfi.
Contrast that to Finnish ones. Horse , hevonen: ˈheʋonen, peasoup, hernekeitto: ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo.
You can't even tell me an objectively correct way to pronounce "read", because depending on the context I'm thinking of, you might say the wrong one. There's none of that in Finnish, we have like one "phone" (as in specific sound that's "pronunciated", äng-äänne, velar nasal iirc might be mistaken too lazy to check).
See if you took 10 English people, or American English people, whatever, English speakers. Gave them a list of fantasy names no-ones ever heard of, they'd try applying rules to familiar feeling bits, like if the name sounds Latin or French or Spanish, but it'd be subjective and very much guesswork. So you'd get 10 English speakers saying all the males differently, but prolly some would go as the writer intended, seeing how writers often use real life inspiration so we rely on how we know people might pronounce them.
Put 10 Finns there, you'll get exactly the same from everyone. Theyre probably all horribly wrong per the writers intention, but each will say the same thing.
But, that's just the book language, the official version of Finnish. We only got written Finnish 500 years back. Dialects are much older. Growing up I had troubles understanding a lot of the vocabulary my grannies used. And then I grew up a bit more realised lots of it is etymologically from a few hundreds years back from the Swedish influences. Though she's doesn't speak a lick of Swedish. Or didn't, rather. (RIP).
But genuinely within 150 miles of me there's more variance in language than in the English in the whole of North America. It's hard for Americans to understand how stubbornly communities can isolate themselves with language that "those people" don't know. Which is why the UK has so many more accents than the US. It's just time. Finnish tribes are still clearly visible mostly as counties, largely like in Italian. Although Finnish dialects I presume are closer together to each other than Italian ones, there's quite a bit of difference going from the extreme south to the extreme north. Or just driving a few hours east.
Tldr the longer point I'm making is that I get the center centre confusion, because English utilises the er-sound. But most languages don't, so... It's subjective. Finnish people probably say litra "liter-uh" sort of, because French and Swedes would've been saying sit so it ends in R, but ours don't, so we added an a. And the French wrote it litre, so we went with "litra", especially since "littera" was already taken.
Grammar ruled for French though, those I'm not gonna start explaining. Gonna run out of char limit.
I may be a bit straightforward, I mean to jestingly poke, not actually offend. My apologies if offense was caused.
Oh I'm sure me saying that is interesting from your POV. But I'm agreeing with your point, English does it totally wrong for sure.
And if the -er sound is as rare as you say, then I guess the pronunciation is just implied.
I don't know exactly why (nor do I care enough to dig into the history of this detail) American English went with "lee-tur" or more casually, "lee-dur"(almost exactly like the word "leader", but if they had home with spelling it correctly, than it would've been pronounced differently.
So it was one thing or the other was gonna be different, simply because we actually do have that sound that makes the spelling look wrong to us.
I think I did get a little offended by the jest, but not consciously or intentionally.
I have learned about the relative rarity of the -er sound in most places. It's very common in this language, so that's surprising to me.