Why is "center" in Canada spelled "centre?"

[Brandon]

It goes the other way, too. I listen to sports stations in the UK and they say "game" regularly. They don't call it a "match" as much as we think. They even use "on the field" occasionally. And the term "free agent" is starting to pop up in place of "free transfer."

Technology means we'll see this convergence continue. I'd say in another 200 to 300 years all the English-speaking populations will be nearly indistinguishable.

Weel see if dyat comes to pass.  Coold bee weel all youse da sahme slyang. 

[jakeroot]

Technology means we'll see this convergence continue. I'd say in another 200 to 300 years all the English-speaking populations will be nearly indistinguishable.

Even within American, localized accents seem to get less and less noticeable with time. Fewer people seem to speak with strong accents like they may have a few decades ago.

Weel see if dyat comes to pass.  Coold bee weel all youse da sahme slyang.

I can't understand your babble, you tosser.

[Brandon]

Technology means we'll see this convergence continue. I'd say in another 200 to 300 years all the English-speaking populations will be nearly indistinguishable.

Even within American, localized accents seem to get less and less noticeable with time. Fewer people seem to speak with strong accents like they may have a few decades ago.

Weel see if dyat comes to pass.  Coold bee weel all youse da sahme slyang.

I can't understand your babble, you tosser.

Speak for yourself out west.  We've been undergoing a vowel shift here, making our different than yours.  See my comment you couldn't understand.

[jakeroot]

I can't understand your babble, you tosser.

Speak for yourself out west.  We've been undergoing a vowel shift here, making our different than yours.  See my comment you couldn't understand.

That was called a "joke" and it obviously flatlined the second I hit post.

[1995hoo]

Out of curiosity I asked my 11th grade English teacher what would happen if I used British spellings on essays and she said she would have to penalize me for it. I thought that was stupid and total bullshit because they're the same word, but whatever.

I don't think it's bullshit.  Your teacher is supposed to be teaching you how to spell correctly in the country you're in.  I assume a British teacher would penalize one of their students for using American spellings.

My mother was an English teacher in Northern Virginia and she followed the principle of not marking British spellings wrong as long as the person was consistent in using them. I think she said one of her students was the child of someone at the British Embassy one year, so no doubt that influenced her thought process.



As far as the "-er" sound goes, I have to post my favorite license plate photo. Took this in the car park at Airbus in Filton a few years back. My British friends wondered what I was looking at and then all burst out laughing when they saw this.

[vtk]

and torque in pound-feet, not whatever torque is in Metric ( kg-cm ? ),

Newton-meters (N‧m), or maybe kilonewton-meters (kN‧m).

[slorydn1]

I consider myself multi-lingual, LOL.

Everybody in my family who is older than me was born and grew up in the NYC metro area. I was born and spent the first 10 years of my life in southwestern Michigan, the next 10 years in the Chicagoland area, and the last 25 years in eastern North Carolina.

My wife has often remarked that my "SheeeCAHgo" accent really comes out when I am pissed about something, yet most of the time I sound like I have lived down south most of my life. Yet, when I am speaking with one of my older family members then the NY (specifically Long Island) accent comes to the fore after only about 5 minutes or so.

My wife was born here, but grew up in Lewiston Idaho. She really doesn't have an accent where one can pinpoint where she is from. She does have a few words that I jokingly pick on her about, like she uses a ruler to may-sure something whereas I meh-sure it.

Hey, Brandon, I'll see your pop with a soda, and I'll raise ya a glass of MELK, to boot, LOL.


Now for the actual topic, I never had a problem with the alternative British spellings for words. I spent alot of time during my formative years reading about World War I and World War II and had gotten quite used to seeing our -er words ending in -re (although I always found it odd that they didn't conform to that format for all words that ended that way, like the word minister is spelled the same way on both sides of the pond).

[english si]

(although I always found it odd that they didn't conform to that format for all words that ended that way, like the word minister is spelled the same way on both sides of the pond).

Minister, which has the right entomology for an -re ending (and did have one way back when) seems to have been Latinised (the Latin word that the French took it off was 'minister'), whereas centre in Latin is centrum, so that wouldn't give an -er ending.

[1995hoo]

....

Sort of, but the thing is, the Brits use "draft" if they use said word to refer to conscription, same U.S. Americans do.

Indeed, though the NFL draft is hardly conscription, merely picking players.

....

Of course, although players who wind up with the Redskins might argue otherwise! In this case I deliberately used "conscription" because I intended a broader meaning than the player-selection process–I meant to include things like a military draft as well, as that process is not a "draught" either!

[ghYHZ]

Enjoy your LabOUR Day holiday everyone!

[J N Winkler]

The one that annoys me is when media outlets change the spelling of proper nouns. The Washington Post, for example, constantly refers to the British "Labor Party." There's no such thing–"Labour" is a proper noun. It's incorrect to change the weird spelling of someone's name–for example, NBA player Mr. Wade spells his name "Dwyane" (yes, the "y" goes before the "a") but the media never change it to the more conventional "Duane." Nor should they. The same applies to things like "Labour Party" or, to use an example from the UK media, New York's "World Trade Centre" is incorrect.

I have the same reaction because I try to follow a policy of using the spellings and terminology that are appropriate in the native setting of the thing under discussion.  Hence, I do not speak of "British freeways" or "American motorways," I always write Labour in relation to the party co-founded by the Webbs, I speak of a hazardous-materials endorsement on a truck driver's license and an endorsement on the licence of a car driver who has been convicted of a traffic offence (endorsement in driver licensing contexts is nearly antonymous between the US and Britain), etc.  But these subtleties are lost on print outlets who aim for a lowest-common-denominator audience (sixth-grade reading level in the US) and confect their stylebooks accordingly.

[The High Plains Traveler]

U.S. Southern neo-secessionist groups advocate the restoration of British spelling. I also have seen a TV commercial with an actress with an obvious Southern accent who says, "Dentures are different to real teeth." Our British contributor used the same construction above. That sounds, well, foreign to me, as where I live things are different from each other, not to each other. And, I definitely stress the "r" in center.

[J N Winkler]

Sort of, but the thing is, the Brits use "draft" if they use said word to refer to conscription, same U.S. Americans do. "Draught" is correct as to beer, but to refer to the "NFL Draught" is absurd!

Draft in the sense of induction into military service is not the word I typically see first reached for in Britain, though--usually it's call-up colloquially and conscription formally.

British English has always seemed to me somewhat more dependent than American English on certain set phrases with implicit meanings.  For example, fair enough has an implicit undertone of "Don't agree with you, but don't really want to get into it with you," while X took tea with Y tends to imply "X and Y are traditional enemies and had a peace summit."  I think this has a knock-on effect on word choice.

Always used "litre" and not "liter", AFAIK.  But they also continued to (still do) account for power in "Horsepower" and not kilowatts and torque in pound-feet, not whatever torque is in Metric ( kg-cm ? ).

I tend not to spell out the word liter myself; instead, I report displacement using the SI unit abbreviation (L) with the appropriate number of significant digits (e.g. no-one ever says the Lexus LS400 has a "4 L V8 engine"--it's always "4.0 L V8").  It gnashes my gears to see the numerical quantity and the unit written together without any separation, but a hyphen looks like being hypercorrect while text entry facilities (such as the post dialogs on this forum) often lack the ability to insert nonbreaking spaces.

In regard to output figures, in US contexts power is always hp and torque is always either ft-lb or lb-ft (there are some purists who insist one ordering of lb and ft is appropriate for torque output of an automobile engine, and the other is appropriate for fasteners).  Internationally, power is either W or PS (Pferdestärke = metric horsepower) and torque is invariably N-m (often written, as Vtk does above, with the multiplication dot substituted for the hyphen).

I don't think it's bullshit.  Your teacher is supposed to be teaching you how to spell correctly in the country you're in.  I assume a British teacher would penalize one of their students for using American spellings.

I think context matters.  In a high school setting it often looks pretentious to use the other language area's spelling conventions without any matching alterations in diction (e.g. American words and phrases with British spellings), and this is something a high school teacher could reasonably be expected to convey as part of instruction in good writing style.  But at the graduate level it jars less to use American spellings in a doctoral dissertation about British motorways since that is something that could notionally be published in the US rather than the UK.

The law school instructor 1995hoo cited--the one greatly concerned about judgment versus judgement--sounds like the classic example of a professor with an unreasonable fixation on a fine point who cannot be told boo because he has tenure.

I also have seen a TV commercial with an actress with an obvious Southern accent who says, "Dentures are different to real teeth." Our British contributor used the same construction above. That sounds, well, foreign to me, as where I live things are different from each other, not to each other.

I think all of the usages of different + preposition are awkward to some degree.  Different from rankles me less than different than and different to, but I still try to shift to active voice (generally using the verb differ) to avoid this sort of construction.