We were about to fly off on holiday and, as the seat belt signs flashed on, my wife (top comedian Catie Wilkins) tweeted: ‘I put my phone on airplane settings and it told me not to call it Shirley.’ To be fair, she tweets this every time we fly but so she should, it’s a good joke. I retweeted it.
It’s not like Twitter is a menagerie of humourless pedants with empty lives but when I later checked my replies, someone had informed me that ‘airplane’ was an Americanism and that as I was British I should use the word aeroplane. Yes, because that would be a great joke, wouldn’t it? Firstly, no phone (as far as I am aware) calls this function ‘aeroplane settings’, but even if one did, that cack-handed edit ensures that the joke no longer makes sense. Had I tweeted: ‘I put my phone on aeroplane settings and it told me not to call it Shirley,’ people would assume I had lost my mind.

Are there any Brits that even use the word ‘aeroplane’ any more? We call a plane ‘a plane’, don’t we? Aeroplane sounds like something coined in the 17th century by a huckster in a travelling circus. Nowadays, you only need add the aero if the plane is made out of bubbly chocolate. Though, personally, I’d love to travel in an Aero-plane: you could snack on your armrest if you got peckish, though you might get carried away and end up chewing off a wing. Doubtless someone will now tweet me to say: ‘Your chocolate aeroplane idea is so ridiculous as to be almost comical. The heat generated by the chocolate engines would melt the fuselage.’ Pedantry is comedy’s kryptonite.

More >>  http://metro.co.uk/2013/01/25/richard-herring-sometimes-the-best-jokes-are-lost-in-translation-3365705/