Like any true American, I'm proud to not be British!
No hate towards our neighbors across the pond, but they are truly a backwards, barbaric people, with their lorries, lifts, flats, chips, jumpers, and trainers. There isn't a people more brutish than the British!
Us Americans, we are far more civilized, with our trucks, elevators, apartments, french fries, sweaters, and sneakers.
Naturally, we wanted to distance ourselves from those tea-drinking freaks and over time have adopted better spellings for the words we unfortunately share with them. However, in our noble pursuit of expunging ourselves of our englishry, we kinda threw the baby out with the bath water on a few of the spellings we selected.
In researching for this piece, wanting to give my readers nothing but the cold, hard facts, I discovered some other proposed spelling reforms by Noah Webster, the man largely credited for codifying American English spelling. Webster, a patriot, is the one we should graciously thank for fixing many of the obvious spelling blunders. However, he too made some mistakes, ones that thankfully never caught on:
- bread -> bred
- give -> giv
- women -> wimmen
- machine -> masheen
- soup -> soop
I mean the guy was a genius, but I can't read through that list without chuckling to myself.
English, like all other exports of England, will always be flawed. If we had a truly phonetic spelling for our words, that would be great, but would look terribly silly, and thus should never be done.
But first, the hits
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centre -> center, theatre -> theater, metre -> meter, all the other re -> er words
Ok, this one is obvious. I know English is famous for its silent "e"s, but most of those are used for making a vowel long. Why on God's green earth would we ever put "re" when the word clearly ends in a "er" sound.
-
mould -> mold, plough -> plow, and draught -> draft
Oh you, "ou", such a versatile vowel pairing! Ayy you, "au", you ain't bad too. However, neither of you are welcome in the moldy draft beer I'm having after I plow the driveway.
-
programme -> program, catalogue -> catalog, dialogue -> dialog
Oh wow! Would you look at that? You can just cut off a handful of letters and just have the same word!
Thank you Noah Webster for saving us from this drivel!
America's greatest mistake
However, there is one group of changes that I strongly disagree with: the "ou" -> "o" group. This includes labo(u)r, colo(u)r, hono(u)r. From an early age I distinctly remember seeing the British spellings and thinking to myself, "Wow, we messed up on this one". Even though it is not acurate, we don't say "col-our", the British spelling does distinguish that they are two different sounds, where the American spelling discards it.
What really grinds my gears is that the American spelling strips the human element from labour and honour. Whose labour brought us all the great accomplishments of humaninty? OURs! Not ORs!
From speaking with my fellow countrymen, this opinion is not widely held, but every time I have to write these words in a formal setting, I have to fulfil my patriotic duty of conforming, despite my fingers instinctively reaching for the u key, itching to press it.
Additionally there are a few words that I wish were changed to be more uniform with their other forms. The one that comes to mind is "speech". Why is it that when a speaker is speaking, that they are making a speech? Shouldn't they be making a speach?
I accept that my pet-problems with American spellings isn't ever going to result in a 2nd spelling reform movement, especially if it means bringing our spellings closer in line with that of the crown, but I do make a conscious effort to use my preferred spelling of the "ou" -> "o" group whenever possible. Text editors and word processors tend to not like my spelling of speach, and so I will concede that ground.
I shamefully admit, the British are right on this one