UCLE: The history of ucle

uk.culture.language.english

A brief history of the news group

The “cmsg” creating uk.culture.language.english was posted by Charles Lindsey on November 16th, 1999. An extract from this message is given below…

The newgroup message for uk.culture.language.english has just been issued.

For your newsgroups file:
uk.culture.language.english English language use and abuse

Charter for unmoderated group uk.culture.language.english

This newsgroup is for the discussion of use and abuse of the English language, as used in the UK, including serious and humorous examples, likes and dislikes, and the evolution of English.

Comparisons with English as used elsewhere are permitted, but posts based on advocacy of alternative forms, or other languages, are off- topic.

ADVERTISING

Advertising is forbidden.

BINARIES & FORMATTING

Encoded binaries (e.g. pictures, compressed files, etc.) are
forbidden. Such material belongs on a web or ftp site to which
a pointer may be posted. Cryptographic signatures (e.g. PGP)
may be used where authentication is important and should be as
short as possible.

Posts must be readable as plaintext. HTML, RTF and similarly
formatted messages are prohibited. To see how to make your newsreader comply with this, read <http://www.usenet.org.uk/ukpost.html>.

WARNING

Anyone posting contrary to this charter may be reported to their "postmaster" and/or Service Provider.

Proponent:
Chris Croughton <email address>

The first post to uk.culture.language.english is difficult to identify because of varying propagation times.

For working purposes, the header below shows the first post I have…

> From: pemb0471 at sable dot ox dot ac dot uk (Janet McKnight)
> Date: 16 Nov 1999 18:38:06 GMT
> Subject: Hooray!

Finally, this group exists!

Thanks (and hugs!) to Chris Croughton for getting this group off the
ground, and to all the other people who've made it happen.

Looking forward to much interesting language discussion, amusing pedantry,
and useful ideas for my thesis... (oops, don't want to look like I'm
asking people to do my homework for me!) :-)

I'll let somebody else set the (on-topic) ball rolling, I just wanted to
say 'hurrah' and stuff.

Jan xx

The 14 first posts to uk.culture.language.english show an interesting site distribution.

bits(dot)bris.ac.uk
bridith(dot)freeserve.co.uk
chello(dot)nl
cus(dot)cam.ac.uk
dial(dot)pipex.com
gvass(dot)demon.co.uk
hwthwood(dot)demon.co.uk
keris(dot)demon.co.uk
noggincottage(dot)freeserve.co.uk
online(dot)no
redwoods(dot)demon.co.uk
sable(dot)ox.ac.uk
village(dot)uunet.be
warwick(dot)deletetoreply.ac.uk

UK (11) Netherlands (1) Norway (1), and Belgium (1)

This site

This site was inaugurated on the 18th of March 2000, and our 1,000th hit was about 6 days after that. We expect to be a low volume site because there's lots of English language resources already out there, and we do not expect to become a FAQ. We have reserved the domains ucle.org and ucle.co.uk for two years.

In March 2001, this site was transferred to a directory in the http://alt-usage-english.org domain.

We are especially grateful to Bryan Lord (aka, "Perchprism"), Jim Nugent, and Rey Aman who proofed the initial set of articles and gave invaluable feedback on the design and layout of this site.

An @ucle.org email address

If a contributor requires an emergency email address, we can arrange for a temporary email address and autoforwarding from our site.

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