i could go on all day, but this is the item bugging me at the moment

[fox]

My Fellow Americans:

Please don't spell color and other such words with a 'u' -- colour -- because you think it makes you look smarter, differently educated, more cultured, richer, or any of that.  It doesn't.  British and US English have different ways of spelling things and that's okay.  If you use colour and honour and whatnot and say "oh, that's how I learned to spell it, I can't spell it the other way", you are exposing yourself as little better than ignorant.  Of course you can spell it the other way.  You know how I usually type all in lowercase around here, capitalizing only in instances of special emphasis, Pooh-style?  It's not because that's how I learned to type and I can't use the shift key, yo.  It's a choice I'm making -- just, I submit, as you are making a choice to spell flavor with an extra letter that doesn't have any place in the written representation of your dialect.

Which -- okay, choices are choices, and I should back up a step and admit that your choices are your own and you do your own thing.  I'm sure the fact that I don't customarily use capital letters (although I do spell things correctly, eschew netspeak, use punctuation, and so on) must cause some people to think of me as ignorant or selfish or pretentious or a variety of other things.  But I want you to be aware that your habit of spelling things in the British style makes some of us -- me, at any rate -- think you are aiming for a level of haughtiness you can't quite reach.  It's the written equivalent of a really bad imitation of an accent.  If you write colour but not centre, I mean to say, the game is up.  You're exposed.  (I give special dispensation for theatre, because I -- and I know there are others like me -- make a distinction between theatre and theater.)  If you don't know a license from a licence, or spell organization with an 's', or eat biscuits instead of cookies, or recycle aluminium instead of aluminum, etc., etc., etc., then for the love of god get the 'u' out of color.

Because the thing is this:  there's nothing wrong with American English.  Nobody looks smarter or more cultured or any of those things I mentioned up top for spelling things in the British style, because there is nothing inherently stupid or uncultured or any of that about things spelled in the American style.  There's no earthly reason to try to pretend to be something you're not, and fail, because there's nothing in the world wrong with what you are.

signed,
Fox

People actually educated in British schools are exempt from the above rant.

Comments

[misia.livejournal.com]

What if you were just exposed to too many Roald Dahl books (in the UK editions because a lot of the US ones didn't exist then) as a child and sometimes you add 'u' to things because it looks right? I have a tendency to write them in different ways -- sometimes it seems to be a subconscious usage thing, as indeed in the case of theater/re. I particularly find that I write "favour" a lot because it looks correct to me. "Colour" doesn't, but "colourful" does.

Also, "biscuits" are, in my household, both American-style biscuits (e.g. buttermilk biscuits) and also sweet baked things that are not American-style cookies. Garibaldi sultana biscuits, for instance, are a favorite of my Belovedary's and they are NOT cookies. Ditto with the things that the Belovedary is fond of that are like Club crackers with crunchy sugar crystals on top -- sugar biscuits.

However, my car does not have a bonnet and a boot. Nor do I pronounce "schedule" incorrectly (heh heh). Or put the extra syllable into my tin foil. All those things seem wrong to my ear and eye.

I should tell you a story, though. When I began working for an NPR station a long time ago, one of my jobs was to set up and start recording the satellite feed of BBC World Service overnight programming. I looked forward to it because it gave me a chance to listen in, and I was so starry-eyed impressed by the BBC radio at the time (NPR-kiddies tend to have a terrible inferiority complex with regard the Beeb) that I thought "Oh, great, this will give me a chance to listen to how they pronounce all kinds of things, so I can do it right, just like the BBC does."

All fine and well until I heard a report from a place called "Nick-a-rag-yew-uh" that included the word "eye-gwa-new-uh." After I got over being shellshocked I thanked my lucky stars they hadn't gone to Ti-jew-an-yew-uh as well. Nicaragua and iguana had been quite enough.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

The BBC's awful with regard to foreign names. They try hard to pronounce them correctly, which I suppose is good, but this results in the pronunciation changing weekly as they try to work out how to do it properly. It's great fun to watch, but very silly.

I thought the whole point was that, if you're an American, you're *meant* to pronounce schedule incorrectly? :p

[darthrami.livejournal.com]

See, I'm with her. Due to the fact that my grandmother spelled things that way - colour and humour and theatre and grey and all of that - plus the inundation of UK versions of childrens books as a child, that's what I knew for a long long time. Crappy US elementary schools managed not to break me of the habit, and by the time I got to the point where I realized that the reason I was spelling them differently from everybody else was that I'd read these books and such, I was in a rebelious stage, and it stuck.

And so, yes. I can, and do, write it the other way. On professional documents and such, I do. But in my own personal space, it's what looks right to my eyes and my brain, and it's just that - my own personal space.

But then, you and I have had this conversation before. *g*