09-19-2012, 05:59 PM
As a kid I had a speech imped... imp... impediment... My fathers 'cure' was to send me to an English, English tutor.
As a result I picked up certain British habits such as spelling with endings of 're' instead of 'er'. Such as writing centre instead of center.
What has helped a lot to improve my 'writing skills' and stick with American English is that I use spell checker. Centre gets a red line under it, so when I accidentally write it 'centre' I go back and fix the 'error' and make it 'center'.
According to my English teacher in school my spelling mistakes were exactly that - mistakes. As such I got 'punished' at school, even though he knew that I was using British Spellings. He even called me a pompous ass for writing that way.
Another side effect of that tutor is I speak properly. Some people accuse me of having an 'English Accent'.
As for the way things are spelled differently. When the colonies were established in the 1600's, there were no real dictionaries in use. It was Mr Webster who got all upset over all of the different ways words were being spelled thus he decided to set about correcting the common man and wrote the first American English Dictionary. That was in 1806, around 200 years after the first English Settlers arrived and set up destroying the New World. I mean colonizing the new world....:eek:
English is a living language, meaning that because it is in constant use it is evolving, changing.
Take a familiar word: Gay. Over a century gay meant joyful. Thus when we sing Gay Apparel we are not talking rainbow shirts, leather, etc, we are talking about 'joyful' clothing. In the late 19th Century started taking on the homosexual overtones, 'gay' being used to describe a 'homosexual'.
Near the end of the 20th century gay has once again taken on a change, now it is a general negative, as in 'that car is gay' meaning that car is bad.
Spelling has kind of frozen since we started using dictionaries. Prior to the use of dictionaries, spelling changed from generation to generation. And the letters themselves have changes.
The letter f used to look more like the letter s, thus when reading an older manuscript such as what Chaucer would have written s's often are pronounced as f's.
If you have read Chaucer you will also find that there have been major changes n how words are spelled. http://molcat1.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/record.asp may be helpful.
As far as I'm concerned, writing the 'English' Style or writing the American style are both acceptable as long as the writer sticks to just one or the other forms.
As a result I picked up certain British habits such as spelling with endings of 're' instead of 'er'. Such as writing centre instead of center.
What has helped a lot to improve my 'writing skills' and stick with American English is that I use spell checker. Centre gets a red line under it, so when I accidentally write it 'centre' I go back and fix the 'error' and make it 'center'.
According to my English teacher in school my spelling mistakes were exactly that - mistakes. As such I got 'punished' at school, even though he knew that I was using British Spellings. He even called me a pompous ass for writing that way.
Another side effect of that tutor is I speak properly. Some people accuse me of having an 'English Accent'.
As for the way things are spelled differently. When the colonies were established in the 1600's, there were no real dictionaries in use. It was Mr Webster who got all upset over all of the different ways words were being spelled thus he decided to set about correcting the common man and wrote the first American English Dictionary. That was in 1806, around 200 years after the first English Settlers arrived and set up destroying the New World. I mean colonizing the new world....:eek:
English is a living language, meaning that because it is in constant use it is evolving, changing.
Take a familiar word: Gay. Over a century gay meant joyful. Thus when we sing Gay Apparel we are not talking rainbow shirts, leather, etc, we are talking about 'joyful' clothing. In the late 19th Century started taking on the homosexual overtones, 'gay' being used to describe a 'homosexual'.
Near the end of the 20th century gay has once again taken on a change, now it is a general negative, as in 'that car is gay' meaning that car is bad.
Spelling has kind of frozen since we started using dictionaries. Prior to the use of dictionaries, spelling changed from generation to generation. And the letters themselves have changes.
The letter f used to look more like the letter s, thus when reading an older manuscript such as what Chaucer would have written s's often are pronounced as f's.
If you have read Chaucer you will also find that there have been major changes n how words are spelled. http://molcat1.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/record.asp may be helpful.
As far as I'm concerned, writing the 'English' Style or writing the American style are both acceptable as long as the writer sticks to just one or the other forms.
![[-]](https://gayspeak.com/images/duende_v3_local/collapse.png)
