If Stupid is a Color Please Colour Me Stupid

For a while I thought that my computer was British.  But after a while I realized that only my Gmail spellchecker was British; the rest of my computer was American.

Though we speak English on both sides of the Atlantic, some subtle differences still persist in certain facets of our common language.  Compare, as illustration, the sentences below.

American version: “I don’t want to see my girlfriend at the moment.”      

British version: “If I wunted ta see me bird, I’d go to ‘er flat straight away, now wuddn’t I?

As you can plainly discern, the sentences are saying the exact same thing, but have been tinted by a slight drift in the language.

My Gmail spellchecker was slightly less British than the sentence above, but threw fits with my spelling.  If I wrote color, my spellcheck wanted colour.  My catalog was, in Gmail, catalogue. Defense took a back seat to defence.   

At some point I suffered a bit of frustration and sought out websites to see what I could find about spelling.  I landed on this site:  http://grammarist.com/spelling/defence-defense/ and found the following graphs.

Our language is graphing all over the freakin’ place!

The differences in spelling are sometimes a matter of French influence.  At other times the British spellings are a reflection of Latin origins.  Always confusing.   Maybe silly.  If you recall, Mark Twain once said: “Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.”

Not long ago, I complained about my Gmail spellcheck to my young business partner, John.  “It is like…British or something.”

He squinted at me for a while.  “Seriously?” he asked.

I nodded. 

John sat down to my computer and launched Gmail.  Tapity-tap-tap—he menued up through a few settings and changed a language preference.   “There,” he said.  “Fixed.”

We are all American now.

--Mitchell Hegman