Oh! I actually know the answer to this one! American newspaper ads charged by the letter, so a lot of people would eliminate unnecessary letters like the second L in “cancelled” or the U in “colour”. Some of these spelling changes were used so often that they stuck, and now Americans just spell some words differently.
In summary: Americans spell things weird because capitalism
@kyeabove I mean it’s just a letter difference it’s not really a big deal but “color” and “colour” read differently which I’m willing to bet is why it seems weird
“weird”, though, is highly subjective. It’s just different.
Yeah I know, but I’m pissed off that American English is always the default and I can’t even right “Canadian” without my computer telling me it isn’t a word, or my keyboard not having a button for the Canadian dollar symbol (which is actually different than the American). Despite that I always treat little American vs Canadian/British/Australia differences as just jokes, so I’m not really serious about Canada being better, I just like knowing I’m not wrong. Americans poke fun at us for our “U’s” so I poke fun at them back.
Yeah, that is dumb.
Also.. I didn’t realize it was different? It is.
And I mean yeah, it is funny jokes, the thing is.. I can’t participate or I start taking it seriously instead of just viewing it as a cool Language difference.
Oh! I actually know the answer to this one! American newspaper ads charged by the letter, so a lot of people would eliminate unnecessary letters like the second L in “cancelled” or the U in “colour”. Some of these spelling changes were used so often that they stuck, and now Americans just spell some words differently.
In summary: Americans spell things weird because capitalism
@kyeabove I mean it’s just a letter difference it’s not really a big deal but “color” and “colour” read differently which I’m willing to bet is why it seems weird
“weird”, though, is highly subjective. It’s just different.
Oh! I actually know the answer to this one! American newspaper ads charged by the letter, so a lot of people would eliminate unnecessary letters like the second L in “cancelled” or the U in “colour”. Some of these spelling changes were used so often that they stuck, and now Americans just spell some words differently.
In summary: Americans spell things weird because capitalism
@kyeabove I mean it’s just a letter difference it’s not really a big deal but “color” and “colour” read differently which I’m willing to bet is why it seems weird
“weird”, though, is highly subjective. It’s just different.
Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.
Older forms of English kept Latin’s gender-specific suffixes -tor and -trix; tor is for men and trix is for women. So a male pilot is an aviator, a female pilot is an aviatrix. A male fighter is a gladiator, a female fighter is a gladiatrix.
This contrasts with the modern system, where tor is for both men and women, and trix are for kids.
ifesbob 