[How British and American Spelling Parted Ways] (Viewer #67,849)
I’ve always noticed that Brits spelled things with too many letters, but I thought there might’ve been a good reason for Americans to shorten them up, like saving a fortune in typesetting costs or something. Turns out it was just a 19th-century Mac-vs-PC standards battle.
Surely, the IMAO pun king, Oppo, has sumething to saeye on this soubject!
Not me, but Mark Twain (courtesy of twainquotes.com):
“Ours is a mongrel language which started with a child’s vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime.”
– Mark Twain’s Autobiography
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“I don’t see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me, there is such a breezy unfettered originality about his orthography. He always spells Kow with a large K. Now that is just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.”
— Speech at a spelling match, Hartford, Connecticut, May 12, 1875. Reported in the Hartford Courant, May 13, 1875
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“Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.”
— The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling speech, December 9, 1907