Labyrinth said:
I cannot help but feel my rancour rise at Americanised spelling. Really, it's nothing more than a programmed attempt to rationalise an alternate national identity. Sort of like a rebel child taking up profanity for the sake of parental disapproval, and honestly, it's pulled of about as well.
No doubt my view is coloured by experience and all the rest, but I will retain my excess vowels, my -ise and my habit of using Latin prefixes and suffixes.
Great Caesar's Ghost, Labyrinth!
Of all the things to have your rancour rise at.....American spelling? Do you truly deeply and bitterly hate American spelling?
I hope I don't have to remind you that languages do tend to become mildly more esoteric the more they develop on their own. Now that English is so wide-spread across the globe, English has been bound to break down into many different dialects for years...And it has. Note, I did not say accents, but dialects; forms of the language that each have their own peculiar pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
If you think that America is the only country which has a different version of English from Britain, you are very mistaken and need to visit more English-speaking countries on this planet.
Yes, there was a linguistic reform movement in America that Noah Webster hoped would catch on in the 1800s. Parts of it did end up sticking. Admittedly, he started this reform with the hope that his new books and dictionaries would be able to educate American youth better than the paper volumes that were from Britain. He saw many British-spelled words as overly complex, and 'corrupted by the British aristocracy.' Not my view on things, but you must admit he did have good intentions.....Mind you, this desire for simplification was before the rest of the world viewed citizens of the US as a hive of blathering, capitalist fools.
In summary, you can't blame blame America for fiddling around with the English language a bit. Yes, it has grown to be different from British English, but America is after all across the Atlantic Ocean from England. It is my belief that, even if Britain had never lost its sovereignty over the United States, people here on the North American continent would still have changed the spelling and pronunciation of English on this western side of things. It just strikes me as one of those inevitabilities, since there is such a large geographical gap between England and the US.
Darn it, now my ire (not rancour, as I really don't deeply hate you) has risen over the recent increase in yours.....
Now, for my response to the OP
Without any hint of reservation, I say to you that I would take British spellings over US spellings any day of my life and make sweet love to those cultured and elegant letter arrangements. The current way of spelling in the US has taken the English language and made it utilitarian, which is very good for expedient communications, but not as complex and interesting as the British way of spelling. I mean, British spellings really do have that old-fashioned air to them that makes them inimitably charming. Something about the Anglo-Normal flair in British spelling that makes one fall in love with it.
