An ode to American spelling (or why I hate fighting Microsoft Word)

There’s something quite practical and down-to-earth about American English. It’s probably the only clarification we’ve had of our language since Johnson wrote his dictionary.

Developed over a few hundred years, English is a muddled mix of misappropriated or borrowed foreign words, speech-to-written form anomalies, and redundancies. And it’s reflected in the sometimes completely illogical way we spell.

We’ve never pronounced the ‘b’ in “doubt” and “debt”, there’s no reason for the ‘i’ to appear in the word ‘friend’ or for ‘ache’ to be spelled with anything other than a ‘k’.

No wonder we’ve made correctly spelling English words into a competitive sport.

The Americans, lead by Noah Webster in 1806, made some small, but crucial, changes to their written English, mainly in a bid towards cultural independence from their hated British oppressors.

The result is an orthography similar enough to the mother tongue to be understood, but with some deliciously logical changes.

The silent ‘u’ is removed from words like ‘colour’ and redundant, repeated letters are taken out in the likes of ‘travelling’, and ‘cancelled’.

‘Demagogue’, ‘catalogue’ and ‘dialogue’ become cute, little word stumps without their dangling ‘ue’ and I can more easily spell ‘mediaevil’ and ‘anaesthesia’ when there’s no pesky silent ‘a’ getting in the way.

The ‘re’ in Latin, Greek or French-derived words like ‘theatre’ and ‘centre’ are swapped to make everything a bit more consistent and hard ‘s’ sounds are shown with a ‘z’, as in ‘realize’ and ‘analyze’. Very modern and jazzy. The only place I don’t like a good ‘z’ is in the word ‘cosy’, which looks so much more comfortable and soft with the sinuous ‘s’.

But, alas. Writing for mainly a New Zealand audience means I must bow to the British status quo, and constantly fight against Microsoft Word’s attempts to simplify and rationalise my spelling. So, I put in the extra ‘t’s and ‘u’s and ‘a’s and ‘ue’s like a good little colonialist, but secretly yearn for the freedom, punch and extra ‘z’s in American spelling.