🔗Over on Substack this morning, somebody had taken it upon themselves to ‘correct’ a writer’s English.
Tip: realized not “realised”. I’ll surprised that you got that passed spell check! 😊
The irony of her own typos in her post correcting someone that didn’t need correcting aside …
The click through takes you to the thread where Tom replied, but to save you that - this is what he wrote …
Thank you so much for your feedback in jumping in to correct me on what you believe is my poor spelling but you might want to check your facts: it’s lovely that America has its own spelling for words, and I am all for diversity of language, but I think I’m going to stick with the British spelling what with the fact that I was born in and live in the United Kingdom and (though I often wish it was more) have only visited the USA once in my life, for a total of five days.
Which then spawned a steady stream of comments.
Again - to save the click through, I wrote …
Pretty much whatever the UK does .. the response of the US is to do it different, if not completely opposite … spelling, driving on the wrong side of the road, eschewing roundabouts in favor of the four way stop, inventing its own version of perfectly acceptable games, defining the world as being the country .. ‘world series’, ‘
capital of the world’, taking a perfectly lovely uk show and rewriting it as an American show .. oh and then deliver an order of magnitude more episodes (Key Point: no series set up is that good) .. shall I go on?
And I wouldn’t normally bother writing this - except I was reminded of another Americn trait … we are the first … we are best .. we are exceptional …
Over in another group, someone posted this image.
Which reminded me of Philo Farnsworth (‘Father’ of TV), who has a staute in the Presidio in San Francisco
I quote …
Philo Farnsworth (1906-1971) is the American engineer credited with inventing the first television. He had his potato row/scan line epiphany while growing up in Idaho, but it was later that he fully developed his image dissector and electronics system. His first successful broadcast happened on September 7, 1927, between two rooms in his lab in San Francisco.
In my world 1927 follows 1926 .. but let’s not let facts get in the way in America.
I am sure there is some bright person out there that will give me some technical overview of why one or the other - but really, to the average bear … this is the ‘Telly’ for goodness sake.
All this to ask … why are ‘they’ like that?
(I do know ‘they’ aren’t all like that - I’ve lived in the US long enough to know that - which I will use as my excuse why I freely interningle UK and US spelling in a single paragraph.)