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Merry_Widow
Fanatic Posts: 598 Registered: 24/8/2002 Status: Offline
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posted on 30/3/2003 at 10:53 AM |
Man, I drove my teachers nuts when I used to spell it colours, and all that
jazz. I picked it up from books I read as a kid, and I still haven't
dropped it completely. Now it's driving my spellchecker up the wall. ____________________ Okay, dazzle me. |
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Monolycus
Fanatic Posts: 580 Registered: 31/12/1969 Status: Offline
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posted on 30/3/2003 at 05:01 PM |
I am really tickled to hear that people in the UK are getting marked down
for using American spelling... all through college my professors were
sending back my papers and demanding that I dump the anglicisms. I have
been balancing my chequebook for years, while the rest of my peers are
balancing their checkbooks. Still, I refuse to apologise for not spelling
it "apologize". Like Merry_Widow, I read and internalised far, far too
much British literature as a child and I see no reason now to throw my
anglicisms out by the kerb.
The interesting thing, to me, is that the majority of the spelling
differences between what is ostensibly the same language come from
small-mindedness in the late 18th century. After America won its war of
Independence, it was so anglophobic that they deliberately adopted the
avoirdupois system of weights and measures and, where possible,
standardised their spelling to be as unlike the English as possible. This
might seem a bit childish, but you must bear in mind that we are talking
about the ancestors of the same people who are giving you "freedom fries"
because they had an argument with the Franks.
My field of special study in college was archaeology, and nowhere have I
seen this pettiness taken to a more absurd degree. The British and
American schools of archaeology are so petty and competitive, that rarely
do they have the same words to describe things (a piece of broken crockery
in English archaeology is a shard, in America it is a sherd... for no
readily apparent reason apart from being a pain the arse), and when they do
have the same words in their jargon, it is generally a safe bet that they
are referring to two different things (a postmold in America is a darkened
stain in the soil left over as a support beam degraded away... I would have
to take a special class to tell you what a British postmould refers to).
This silly petulance makes language dynamic and linguistically interesting
while keeping anyone from being too terribly offended with the certain
knowledge of what their neighbour might just have said about them.
~M. |
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