Realators--meet on in FeBOOary in the Liberry

[Geoff Bannister]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "sistermagpie" <sistermagpie at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> Geoff:
> The only word in this lot which is famliiar to me as a UK English
> speaker is 'hospitalise' which has been around a long time.
> 
> I am surprised by 'burglarise'. What's the matter with the good old
> verb 'burgle'? It's much easier to write and to say....
> 
> Magpie:
> I couldn't say why that happened, but can only offer that "He's been 
> burgled" sounds like like a joke--like something out of a comedy 
> sketch where people are pretending to be faux-Dickensian.:-) "His 
> house was burglarized" is just, you know, a construction I've always 
> heard, though I acknowledge "burgled" as being valid too.

Geoff:
I don't see why that phrase should sound odd... I had my house broken 
into two years ago and when I said to people, "We came back from 
holiday to find that we had been burgled", no one treated it as funny. 
It's used as a standard word on radio and TV.

'Burglarised' is one of those American words which make me cringe. 
It sounds awkward and cumbersome.