British spelling vs American spelling
From time to time – such as this week – I receive e-mails from young Americans thanking me for an informative and helpful web site but criticising my poor spelling.They simply have no idea that the spelling of American English and British English is different. It comes as a revelation when I politely point this out. It was our language first, guys.
May 19th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Very true. It’s also the case the many British sneer at what they perceive to be silly American neologisms. The word Aluminum, e.g., is assumed to be some oddball American derivative of English. In fact, that is the name the discoverer of the metal, Sir Humphrey Davey, gave to it. In this and in some other usages American English has remained truer to the original common language. However, there is no call for proprietorial sentiment on either side of the Atlantic. Most of the world’s English speakers do not live in either the US or the UK and most speak English, often very well, as a second language. As Edgar Allen Poe said, “The King’s English isn’t his any more. Most of the common stockholders are Chinese” .. or words to that effect.
May 19th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Well, that’s certainly their ignorance showing. I know I go through detailed explanations of differing spellings. We do punctuation differently, too. For instance, commas and periods always go inside quotation marks over here (semicolons and colons never do, and with question marks and exclamation marks, it depends). I think British rules regarding punctuation make much more sense. Let’s all blame Noah Webster.
May 21st, 2007 at 2:44 pm
I thought there was significant evidence that “Aluminum” was actually a mistake – there is a very good word site that discusses this, which I can’t find at the moment.
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Michael Quinion, in ALUMINIUM VERSUS ALUMINUM appears to blame the English chemist Sir Humphrey Davy for making a bit of a mess in naming the element! He first called it alumium (in 1807), then aluminum, before settling on aluminium in 1812. Unlucky atomic number 13!
According to Quinion, aluminum and aluminium were used about equally often in US newspapers in the nineteenth century. It was only around 1895, when the metal began to be widely available and the word started to be needed in popular writing, that aluminum was adopted as the standard spelling.
August 16th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
periods at the end of every sentence? things are gonna get messy