What are some words you feel sound more right in both the American and British English?
I use a mix of the two depending on the word.
For example, I stand by pronouncing words like “Amazon” with an “ehn” sound at the end ovet an “ohn” sound, prefer spelling colour and flavour with a u, and also like using double Ls for words like travelling. Also, it is “grey”. (British English)
However, I pronounce Z as “zee”and call them fries rather than chips.
There are also spellings where I sort of alternate between depending on my mood, such as “meter” vs “metre”and“airplane” vs “aeroplane”
Are there any words that you think sound better in British and American spellings/pronunciations?
Wait? Do you guys not say your aed bed ceds?
Either is right for me and it entirely depends on whatever I’m vibing with at the time!
When I am talking about fibrous material, like individual strands of carbon in a composite, I naturally type “fibre” but when I talk about nutrition or the internet it’s “fiber”
I also tend to spell armor armour and color colour despite being American.
Oh and I write grey instead of gray.
I also catch myself writing units like metre and litre instead of meter and liter sometimes.
It really all depends on if there’s a spellchecker turned on that will tell me I’m spelling things wrong.
Colour and armour is insane especially if you’re American lol
I prefer Traditional English over Simplified.
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Depends on the tense.
I spell it wrong.
I have spelled it wrong.
I spelled it wrong.
I had spelt it wrong.
“I had spelled it wrong” sounds like a hillbilly.
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If you use the wrong past tense all the time, that will definitely make you sound like a hillbilly.
Herbs, because there’s a frikking h in it.
Thanks Eddie Izzard for her skit, that still stuck with me.
Is that the one about the monkey in the tree? I remember absolutely cracking up at that.
Possible. It’s been years since I watched the show on YouTube.
Great Britain is a stone’s throw from France but their use of French loan words is attrocious.
A big shout out to Oxford spelling which mixes American and English spelling and is incredibly hard to find a spell check for. It gives you all the extra u’s and z’s you could ask for.
Oxford spelling, Oxford comma: what’s not to like?
Anything with a United Nations style spellcheck will sort it for you.
Somehow even as a kid in America I always had a preference for the OED at my library. It just exuded this sense of supreme rightness to me.
Never occurred to me that normal grade school kids don’t all have a favourite dictionary. Ah well.
The most noticeable for me are privacy /ˈpɹɪv.ə.si/ and urinal /juːˈɹaɪnəl/. I can’t say I feel any of them are right or wrong, though, it’s just a bit of colour in the language.
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I think you’ll find everyone agrees that it should be fixed but no one wants to compromise on changing how they spell things.
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A silly colloquialism isn’t indicative of success. If you tell people to do something they don’t want to they’re not going to decide they actually like it later on.
There’s just no fucking way most Australians would decide to discard the current spelling of words in favor of the American spelling. I feel certain American’s feel the same about British spelling.
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Sure mate. I’m sure the engineers will step in and fix all the language problems any day now.
like I spell it as “centre” and it seems perfectly fine even though phonetically it doesn’t make much sense
Thanks to coding, I see center as a position and centre as an object. But for the most part, I find US spelling to be lazy spelling for poor pronunciation. Like people just started saying the word wrong and rather than fixing that, just started spelling it wrong too.
Aluminium is prob the weirdest. Like everything on the periodic table ending with -ium; the Latin morpheme in chemistry. But the US just-…like, how?!
I would like to point you to Platinum, and inform you that Aluminum came first.
I will spell out aluminium, but when I have to pronounce it I go with aluminum.
It was found in alum, so it should really have been alumium all along.
Advertisement sounds better in British pronunciation. Adver-tis-ment (/ədˈvɜː.tɪs.mənt/) as opposed to the American Adver-tize-ment (/ˌæd.vɚˈtaɪz.mənt/).
I’m British and have never said the first one you mentioned and don’t think I can recall hearing it. Nearly everyone one will use the second version - adver-tize-ment, although it’s most common to hear ad or ad-vert.
Edit: just asked my great granny who is 99, and she pronounced it adver-tize-ment, so not a generational thing.
Huh! Weirdly, it was definitely pronounced ad-VER-tiz-mint on a lot of the '70s UK TV shows we imported to the US in the '80s. Britain is a big place, though, in terms of dialects, so you and your great granny don’t necessarily rule it out for everyone. Out of curiosity, do you then shorten it to ad or advert?
Think it depends where you put the stress.
I’d say “Ad VER tis ment”
But if I was stressing the tis part, a “tize” sound would feel more natural.
That’s how I would say advertising, for example, “adver TIZE ing”
There’s often words that trip me up and I can’t remember which is the Australian English spelling.
It doesn’t help that devices are often misconfigured to use American English spell checkers.
I don’t “feel” as though different spellings are more correct in these cases.
Schedule, I have to say the correct pronunciation every time I hear it said differently.
Glad you agree on the correct pronunciation of schedule. Fuck the people that say schedule.
Damned right
Me too. It’s the one word that triggers something in my brain.
As the Countess in Roman Holiday tells us, either way is correct :-)
I work in healthcare and it’s an append-i-cectomy not an appen-dectomy. It should have the i pronounced. The Americanised version is just lazy.
