Learn English – the difference between “calling” and “vocation”

This is Indian English. See Vishy's Indian English Dictionary.

July 12, 2006
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: doubt

doubt. /DOWT/. A question asking for clarification. In standard English and American, the noun doubt is uncountable and refers to a lack of complete trust in something. Doubt may be expressed as simply as doubting someone's abilities or as profoundly as someone doubting their own religious faith. Not so in India. In India, doubt can be used as a countable noun. When a school teacher goes over an intricate concept in class, she invariably leaves some students with doubts in their mind about their understanding of the material just covered. Students ask her questions to get a better understanding of the concept and each such question is called a doubt. It is entirely normal to hear a statement like "I have just one doubt, miss" or "If you have any doubts before the exam tomorrow, come see me in the staff room". The doubts in the aforementioned sentences are not as much rooted in a lack of faith as in a lack of understanding. Attentive readers would have encountered the Indian English sense of doubt a fair bit on online message boards in threads started by Indians. Titles such as "Visual Basic .NET/Oracle doubt" are not uncommon for threads on programming-related message boards. It is my understanding that this sense is mostly prevalent in southern India, but I could be wrong on this count.

I'm not sure I've ever heard of yellow traffic lights, but here are 65 written instances of "drove through a yellow light".

I assume it's a US/UK difference. To my British ear, "drove through an amber light" sounds natural, but there are actually only 7 of them.

Note that "ran a yellow light" gets 369 hits, against 23 for "ran an amber light". That stronger bias I put down to the fact that ran a red light is about ten times more common in the US than the UK.

I doubt anyone's choice of colour-word would be influenced by the exact wavelength/frequency of the lights themselves on either side of the Atlantic, but it's worth noting that the UK sequence is Red, Red and Amber, Green, Amber, whereas in the US it's just Red, Green, Yellow. The colour amber is often described as a reddish or brownish yellow. Perhaps British usage is influenced by the fact that half of all the times we see our "yellow" light, the red one is also on.

The official British "security alert" scale was headed by red, amber until it was replaced in 2006 (by an apparently non-colour-coded scale). The American equivalent has red, orange (yellow next).