Lessality
There’s a serious theory behind that, all about ‘grey issues’ and the fact that people don’t often have grey opinions… so really, if it is a grey issue, then that’s just because the black and white opinions are interspersed.
Just out of interest, is my spelling ‘grey’ jarring to those of you that use ‘gray’?
I once received an email from a reader (I presume, though not an observant one) telling me that I had spelled a number of words incorrectly in my posts, and included the following list:
These are wrong –
- Colour - there’s no U in it
- Grey - is spelled with A
- Favourite - why do you keep adding U to everything?
- Criticise - I bet you feel silly for getting this wrong
I was going to email them back, explain that I’m British and tell them that actually, I thought they were wroung.
In the end I figured they wouldn’t get the joke.
Anyway, I did think about it though, and US spelling stands out a mile to me… although, sometimes I use it – partially because I agree that the US spelling is better, partly because I know that the majority of my readership are from the US and partly because I’m too lazy to change the spell-checking thingy to a British dictionary.
…But it doesn’t look wrong, just different.
Phlegm, however, looks wrong and is spelled the same across the Atlantic.
Weird and grief too, buoy and amount.
I have another theory, that I’m not alone in finding that some words just look wrong.
Philip J Schadenfreude on 
I’m a reader from Canada, and I appreciate the British spellings because most are the same here. Having to confront American spelling all over the internet, I find the British spelling a breath of fresh air.
That’s good to know… I figured the commonwealth countries would have a similar set of rules, though there probably are differences.
It’s an interesting point, with English, that whilst British spelling has tradition on its side, US spelling probably has greater numbers… until you include Canada and Australia.
As it happens, the majority of my readers are in the US, whilst the second biggest contingent hail from Australia, closely followed by the UK. Canada, however are about 18th, just behind Japan.
Although I’m an American, I do recognize the difference in the languages. Honestly, I could give two shits about extra U’s and “ise” instead of “ize”. Hell, I even call Z zed. But one thing I refuse to put up with: Whilst. Amongst. Amidst. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? What’s the fucking point of the “st” suffix? Look up Whilst in the dictionary, and it means While. And it’s not like you guys don’t use the word While, so why the crap would you use the word Whilst? Can things be whiler than others, and therefore one can be whilest? And that’s why I hit people who speak british.
Huh, good point, I’ve never really thought about the difference between while and whilst, I imagine it’s traditionally the British form but that it has been/is being gradually superceded over here by the American form. Incidentally, I really don’t think you could care less… I bet if you tried you’d find out that you couldn’t
I’m gonna plug my Semantics professor’s blog now, since it’s all about US/UK differences and it *is* quite interesting. http://www.separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
Plug away, it’s a good blog with some interesting points, particularly relevant to this discussion.
follows the same pattern for all things american, dumbed down
What Shock and Awe said, except I’m a reader from Austraia
JSYK your brit words stand out 1.6 kilometre’s to me too.
Why is there no shades of grey?
Oh, adam, some words look completly wrong to me too. phlegm being one of them, in fact. and reversal, i always say reversle. the main one though, is explanation. i always want to add an i in, cos it’s not explanation, it’s explaination. you can’t tell over t’internet, but i’m putting on a Chandler-from-friends annoying type voice when i say explanation. :p
I do that too! There’s no explaination for it.
I wouldn’t say that either are wrong; I would just call them alternate spellings.
I like Gray with an A but I never ever seen it spelled that way. It just seems more graceful somehow.
As an American I spell pretty much everything the American way but the z’s in -ize words often look a bit silly.
And if I stare at any word longer than a few seconds it starts to look wrong to me, even if I’m positive it’s right.
As an Australian writer I become extraordinarily jarred when I see American spelling because it’s a symbol of how the English-speaking aspects of our culture are being slowly eroded by American ways of thinking, spelling, seeing, etc.
Every time my spellcheck tells me that I’ve spelled colour wrong (or some other word), I simply add it to the American custom dictionary on my computer! Now who’s experiencing cultural imperialism muthaphukka?!?
And, yes, I know that you can set the nationality of your dictionary, but mine often reverts automatically to the US dictionary when I open a document from someone who doesn’t care if there are red lines under their ‘-ise’ words or not.
Having never left the USA (aside from brieff forays into Canadia) I have somehow acquired the British spelling of a handful of words.
Chief amongst them are words along the lines of Spectre, Sceptre, and Theatre. I view this as a logical progression due to the fact that a Specter is not one who Spects.
I am also generally puzzled by the strange mishmash of the “or” suffix- Why is it an Actor/Sculptor and not an Acter/Sculpter, or conversely, why isn’t it a Paintor.
I would also like to see “trix” make a come back for the feminine. It survives in Dominatrix (and the somewhat archaic Aviatrix), but thats not enough! Actrix, Waitrix, et al just sound so much better than their modern counterparts, which likely evolved due to people being lazy enough to abandon the -trix in favor of the minusculy (<- Not a real word? Why not?) easier to pronounce -tress.
As far as cries of dilution of languages due to slang, dialect, etc- If it weren’t for those alterations, we’d all still be speaking Latin, Aramaic, or Enochian (<-in the dictionary, but spell check fails to recognize as correct).
…Language is weird.
Miniscule can’t be used in that way and therefore the conjugation to turn it into an adverb has never been coined. In that situation marginally would have been ideal.
And actress is A LOT easier to pronounce than actrix in my opinion. But most of those words are gravitating to gender neutral alternatives in this age of political correctness.
Aha! I knew it was an “M” word I was looking for, I just pulled the wrong one.
Now to start the discussion that may get out of hand: I’ve never understood the PC alteration of the language to more gender neutral terms, aside from the problem of “he” vastly outnumbering “she” in generic example statements, D&D rulebooks being the cases I’m most familiar with. Most institutions seem to have counteracted this themselves, most commonly simply by alternating between usage of “he” and “she.”
But beyond that, I find the concept of eliminating words like Waitress from the lexicon and replacing them with gender-neutral terms to be even more sexist. To me it says “There is no pride in calling oneself a female server.” Granted, I am male and therefore haven’t been exposed to most blatant instances of sexism, but in my mind people should take as much pride in their gender as they do their race/religion/sexual orientation/heritage/etc.
Replacing gendered terms just seems yet another step (albeit a tiny one) bringing us closer to rubber stamp homogeneity and dehumanization.
Hell’s bells, I was born on the wrong continent, I always spelled them “grey,” “colour,” and “criticise,” before I met up with annoying (and clueless) correction-happy people.
I see it as a clue. It doesn’t bother me.
“Criticise - I bet you feel silly for getting this wrong” has to be the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Just… wow.
I’ve actually always liked the word phlegm: it’s got a nice ring to it. Onomatopoeia, almost, really, with a bit of a Yiddish sound. Actually, have you noticed that basically all Yiddish words are onomatopoeia, in essence? Think about it: plotz and schlep, or mensch, or shmuck, or my favourite chutzpah.
What looks wrong to me is ‘niche.’ Weird word. Oh, and also ‘weird,’ which I always want to be spelt ‘wierd.’ Oh! And while we’re on language things, al la bringing back -trix, lets bring back the -t for perfect tense, rather than using -ed. It’s much prettier sounding. “I burnt my hand!” “You spelt it wrong!” “Many things, have I learnt.”
Any body read the Language Log? Blog by a bunch of linguists — very good, entertaining, and educational!
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/
Oh yes the -t. I’m constantly using the -t instead of the -ed. It’s just better.
Fo’ shizzle.
Oh, I’d almost forgot my favourite zany British alternative spelling. I just learnt these ones yesterday, actually:
In the UK, apparently, vacuuming is spelt hoovering, and laundry is spelt washing. Now aren’t those some radical spelling differences?
That’s kind of like the faucet-tap and sidewalk-pavement differences. I’d normally say vacuuming though; some people in this country can’t seem to understand that there’s more than one company that makes vacuum cleaners.
Aye… here in the South people have a tendency to call all facial tissues ‘Kleenex,’ as if unaware that there are many brands. And in Atlanta, all soda-pop is ‘Coke.’ Even cheap off-brand orange flavoured bubbly-water.
It’s not just people in the south that call “facial tissues” “kleenex.”
People in the northern US do that, too.
Saying “does anyone have a facial tissue?” just sounds terribly awkward.
Yes, same in Canada, as well. Though tissue is making a dramatic and surprising comeback! At least around Toronto. (also, on the other issues, “gray” looks bizarre and wrong to me.)
Business looks wrong too
Business always looks to me like Guinness. Subconscious desires, maybe?
Ahh, a business lunch, anyone?
“Weird” is one of my bad ones, to the point where I don’t ever write it unless I have the correct spelling handy.
Gray and grey I use pretty much interchangeably (Canadian, here).
Ones I see in my day-to-day life (as a lawyer) are judgment and defence. As to the former: Why is it not judgement? D-G-M is not a combination of consonants that looks right. So, anyway, I always spell it wrong. As to the latter, “defense” just looks wrong. It looks like it should be pronounced “deh-fenz”. Agh. Just looking at it now gives me the willies.
The Commonwealth vs US spelling thing doesn’t usually bother me (people pronounce things in a wide variety of different ways, so why not spelling?) except when I’m doing the crossword. Nothing is more frustrating than being stuck in a crossword because I know the answer is “colour” but there’s only 5 spaces.
Gives you the willies, eh? Gives me the howling fantods, it does.
Ah, fantod.
What an excellent word. (=
Oooooh, you know the word! Have you read Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace?
I believe I became acquainted with that word through Mark Twain, but I could be wrong.
I haven’t read Infinite Jest, but I’ll look into it; I’m always looking for more exciting reading material, even though it seems I never have time to get through my extensive reading list.
Oh yeah, Twain did use it, didn’t he? I’d all but forgotten.
Infinite Jest is definitely worth reading, particularly if you like post modern literature, in the lines of House of Leaves or anything Tom Robbins. I’m still working on it… It’s a bloody tome of a book. I think that’s one of the selling points for me: I’m five or six hundred pages into it, only about half done, been reading on it for a month now, and I’m in no way getting tired of it. In fact, I think at some point I’m going to have to sacrifice a few days, because it’s getting to the point where it’s really hard to put down. I wonder how long it would take me to finish it in a single sitting?
Ah.
If it’s that long, perhaps I’ll wait till I have a bit more time to read it.
I tend to get absorbed by books, to the point that I put off things that actually need to be done until I’ve finished reading.
Good Gods! Is it actually spelt judgment??? That looks hideous! I’ve been spelling it Judgement my entire life, and have never been corrected!
I generally alternate between US and British spellings. I primarily leave the “u” out of words like “colour,” but gray and grey are more or less interchangeable, and theatre is nearly always spelled with the “e” at the end.
It often depends on how “pompous” the establishment is. Most stage theatres are indeed theatres, where most movie theaters are theaters. The one I work at was built in the 1910s, and maintains its theatre status, even despite the toxic-spill green interior.
You’re right.
That is a very important distinction to make.
I don’t care whether which country’s convention of spelling you use, but what about grammar?
The majority of your readership IS from the US, not ARE.
Ha! You is of course right… I’ll change it and you get a few geek points…
Wait a minute, I didn’t use the word ‘readership’, I used ‘readers’… that wouldn’t work – ‘the majority of my readers is from the US’.
1. No, the word you’re modifying is “majority”, not “readers” (which is in the prepositional phrase); therefore, the majority (singular) IS from the US.
2. Since when does spelling count on the internet? I see misspellings and grammar mistakes everywhere from casual emails all the way up to supposedly professionally edited news articles on major news sites, and no one cares. How did you get to be a target?
For every person on the internet that doesn’t care about spelling and grammar there’s somebody else who takes pleasure in pointing out the mistakes of others. The irony being that most of those people aren’t particularly good with the words and things themselves.
Damnit.
I won’t be changing it though… from this moment on I’m at war with correct but incorrect-sounding grammar.
…and mosquitoes.
But of course the grammar has differences too! In UK English it’s fine to say that a collective like “government”, “population”, “majority” ARE something. There’s a sort of vague semantic difference related to whether you’re talking about the people or the institution, but it’s hard to explain it. In this case, I’d say the plural is better as the majority of the readers ARE (independently of each other) from the US - on the other hand, the majority of his readers IS more populous than the minority.
grey opinions… , I tottaly agree with that, but still none is always like that, I dont do that that much anyway :0
Adding “U” to certain words actually has something to do with French being the second official language in Canada.
I once wrote an english paper and spelled color “colour” and I think i used favourite too.. anyway, my teacher marked off something like 5 points for it and i got angry. I confronted her after class and said that it was spelled right but it was the british way to spell it. I honestly didn’t notice i had done it though.. because i’ve been trying to change things up and spell things different like that. but she got pissy and said ‘well, what country are we in?’ and wouldnt give me the five points.
your spelling of grey doesn’t make me angry though. interesting outlook on the grey issue thing, too.
Please don’t ever start spelling grey with an a its confusing enough I’m from the U.S. and I spell it with an e and I always see it both ways but if some idiots can’t understand theres a difference in British spelling and American spelling they can just deal with it.
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Actually, Historically, the US spelling is usually correct, after our two great nations split, the “English” language went through a phase of trying to appear more European, hence the appearance of the superfluous “U” as in “Colour”, the Americans wisely didn’t follow this trend and have maintained the “original” spellings of many words
Really?
‘correct’ – that’s a tough one to call. Personally I think both types are acceptable, but if you are talking about precedent, then I’m afraid you are very much mistaken.
The English language developed over hundreds of years… and is mostly a reflection of the cultures that invaded the British isles – Aside from the resident Anglo-Saxon we gained a whole bunch of words when the Romans took over, including many Latin stems… then we also have some Norse words that we borrowed from the Vikings, leaked through the Celts… and then we have the French contingent, which is possibly one of the causes for our extra ‘u’.
Sometimes we kept both words – Pig is Anglo-Saxon, but pork is a French derivative, the same is true with cow and beef… we also borrowed a lot of technical and legal terminology from them… Justice for example.
And this happened way, way before the US was even invaded by us.
Back in the 18th century, UK English was fairly inconsistent, with various spellings for most words being acceptable as standardisation took a while to occur… which began pretty much with Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
The US however would need Noah Webster and his ‘An American Dictionary of the English Language’ in 1828 to begin this process.
And I think that’s when the split gained momentum – before this point there was no standardisation, and so both were probably used interchangeably.
And So, as for the spelling difference being because of the UK trying to appear more European… I doubt that’s true (unless you could show me some evidence to the contrary).
Similarly, to claim that the US use ‘original’ spellings is perhaps a falsehood of chronology.
No, no, when the ancient alien humanoids seeded the primordial seas of our planet with their DNA in hopes that one day we’d grow into creatures resembling them, they spelled words “color” and “gray” and programmed the seeds so that we’d eventually evolve into beings that spelled things the same way. So the ORIGINAL spellings are those used by the ancient aliens!
Heh, I’m actually from over in the U.S. (born and raised here) and I still use “grey”. It always throws me off when people spell it “gray”. I blame this on my Kindergarten teacher, whom I presume picked up the habit from somebody else, since she wasn’t British either.
It is a funny observation though. I have been known to inadvertently add “u” to words like “colour” that have that quirk in the British spelling.
I’ve also also been known to type letters that shouldn’t even be in the word… but that’s more a result of my awkward posture when typing responses to blogs I Stumbled to late at night, while lying in bed waiting for the daily webcomics to update at midnight PST (-8 GMT).
How about TOILET??? Talk about a weird word. T-O-I-L-E-T.
I think the UK spelling looks much more elegant, but that is just my opinion.
colour. favourite.
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All good points but perception is everything. Applying for a job in the US with a resume using English spelling is a great way to not get a job.
When in Rome do a Roman and all that jazz! I lived in the US, Canada and Ireland and a unifying thing for me is that most people seem to know how to spell words that are slightly differently spelt in other countries. Like colour, favourite etc. But ask them to spell misogynist and they start crying. Forums are like that as well; the lowest common denominator will jump on your spelling of their/there/they’re but will they reply on the incredible point you made about single handedly ending world hunger….do they f$#k.
You know when you have a great point and you’re not in the right discussion to make it, so you kinda waffle around and then sneak it in on the flimsiest of excuses? Well I think I just did that..sorry!
What though is your opinion on archaic or obsolete words?
For example I really enjoy using the word irregardless, a 20th century word that is thought to be a combination of irrespective or regardless, a “non-standard word”.
This is a word you can check on the web and there are many sources but a lot of people have challenged it. Should I bring a dictionary with me everywhere I go or would it just make more sense to tell them they are wrong until they accept it?
Funny word spellings
English—–US
Aluminum-Aluminium
aeroplane -airplane
Penis-Panis (wait is that just me?)
behove-behoove
moustache-mustache
speciality-specialty
“You know when you have a great point and you’re not in the right discussion to make it, so you kinda waffle around and then sneak it in on the flimsiest of excuses?”
I think this site is based around that as its entire premise… welcome to The Flowfield Unity.
Personally, I love playing around with language – new words are my favourite, closely followed by words of yester-year.
I like to use the words ‘cute’ and ’sophisticated’ in their traditional, rather than modern sense.
I like ‘irregardless’ though, that should catch on.
Panis, hoho.
I for one always use the o in moustache. The other way looks funny.
I’m afraid spellcheck is going to steal our British spellings from us. Our computers are automatically set to American spellings, and at work no matter how often I change to Australian English, it changes itself back, as the server controls the entire company’s computers. It changes “ise” words without so much as a by-your-leave, just changes them straight over to “ize” as you type. And with more internet and less books, it seems as though we have a generation who don’t know how to spell in the first place and believe whatever spellcheck tells them. I’m seeing my language slip away and I cry for it.
Damn you Yanks and your Boston Tea Party!!!
(JK)
Back to the painter/paintor thing -
I always wondered about musicians - drummers and trumpeters, but pianists and… flautists??? Why shouldn’t the first two be drummists or trumpetists? Or the latter be pianoers and fluters?
Strictly looking at the examples you cited, piano becomes pianist because it ends in a vowel, which tends to derail any standard conjugation rules; drum and trumpet end in easy consonants which take the -er more gracefully. As for flutes and flautist: that I don’t know, but I imagine it’s some kind of loanword which follows (or perverts) the rules of some other language.
I say if you like it the wrong way do it that way. People will think you’re eccentric and be drawn to you. If you’re really good they’ll probably start asking you to do public radio arts discussion shows.
All of the words listed are correctly spelled, provided they are in the language of the audience.
There’s plenty of words that are spelled in ways that make absolutely no sense. The English language can’t follow it’s own rules.
British spelling doesn’t bother me; I sometimes find it more elegant. I’m aware of the extra u’s and the s vs. z thing, but is solace one of those words also spelled differently across the pond? Because I’m used to seeing it solace, but I’ve seen it a few places as solice, which I couldn’t find in the dictionary. So I’m wondering: a misspelling or a Brit thing?
As far as I can tell, ‘Solace’ is the only correct way to spell it… I think people confuse the ‘I’ sounding pronunciation of the ‘A’ and so spell it incorrectly.
However, the chances are that if enough people do this for long enough, the spelling itself will actually change… mob rules when it comes to spelling, and that’s why I think the US influence on British spelling is a little bit of a worry – there are more people that use those spelling and with the internet as a forum, it may be likely that we all end up using US spellings.
I am extremely bothered when I see people spelling “focused” with two “s”s. I don’t know which is the British spelling, but I simply cannot abide the double s in that word.
I hate it when people mix up “loose” and “lose”. That’s not an issue with alternate spellings, though, that’s just an intolerance on my part of poor grammar.