Talk:Gaol

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Is not Gaol also the name of all the viralent diseases people could catch in prison? It was more feared than prison.--4.228.87.206 04:56, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

I doubt it, most likely someone was reading a text with gaol spelling and "guessed" wrongly its definition. It's quite common amongst people who are unfamiliar with it's spelling, people often assume it as an old type of prison, instead of just an type os spelling. - UnlimitedAccess 19:30, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Redirect

We tend not to have separate pages for alternative spellings of words, which is why I think this should redirect to the prison article. Where there is something to be said about an alternative spelling, such as its use in official contexts in Australia, that can all be noted in the main article. Someone looking up "gaol" in Wikipedia should find themselves at an article about gaols, not a note about spelling. If someone writes a proper article about Gaol the Iroquois wind god this will need to be turned back into a disambig, but Gaol (god) just said "Gaol was a wind god in Iroquois mythology," and the article about Iroquois mythology says "Gaol is the wind god," making that page fairly useless as it was. It makes sense to redirect this page to prison. — Trilobite 19:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

That is not the wikipedia way, we dont redirect an article because the content on the Gaol article is slim, if the topic is notable we stub the topic and have wikifaith that the article will be eventually fleshed out. No doubt there are other topics for Gaol (such as the C++ library called Gaol) that will one day have articles anyway. - UnlimitedAccess 09:34, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I dispute that gaol is rarely written nowadays. For instance, it is the British English spelling (ref. Oxford English Dictionary), and is still found in modern publications (Such as Simon Hoggart's sketches in The Guardian and throughout the Private Eye) We should not condemn it to Early/Middle English just because it has been subdued by the American English spelling in many cases. MJSchofield 12:50, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree; although the spelling is often used in the UK in a rather olde-worlde way, to indicate some sort of historic prison building, it can however be used quite rightly in a modern sense. DWaterson 15:52, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Gaol is still used and I find it strange that the article claims "jail" to be the official British term now. Both spellings are correct in the UK, but this article doesn't afford that, although it acknowledges Australians use it? I think this needs to be addressed.

The description also indicates that the British and American uses of "jail" are the same, but doesn't the British gaol/jail translate into what the Americans would call a prison or penitentiary, whereas the US jail is more akin to the overnight cells in a British police station? I think that the description needs a complete re-write, but I don't really feel like doing it at the moment! Chris 22:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)