My intent is not to upset, merely to enlighten, given that we, the UK and the USA, are often noted to be two nations divided by a common language. If you have anything sensible to add to, or critique of what follows then please leave a comment in my Language Stuff guest book.
I use Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary (I'll just call it Webster's) as that is a respected American dictionary. However, given some arguments that I have had with American authors for whom I have been proof reading, Americans sometimes seem unaware of what such as Webster's says! I am also making no attempt to use technical terms that would baffle the average reader as I do not want to end up with the sort of articles one sees in such as Wikipedia which are so full of technical terms that they tell the non-expert absolutely nothing.
Let us be clear before we start, English English is a large and complex language and as such it leaves plenty of opportunity for change and improvement. We English, despite the impression to the contrary that we may occasionally give, are all in favour of change and improvement. We've been doing it from day one! What we disapprove of though is change made in ignorance of the rules, such as they are. The rules are there for good reasons, hence we prefer them to be observed.
When reading elsewhere about the differences between the various flavours of English, you may occasionally see the phrase "national preference" or some such used in relation to spelling. When there is no rule in force, then indeed the selection between arbitrary spellings may quite correctly be identified as "national preference". All too often however, what that phrase really means is that a rule exists but the writer is blissfully unaware of it, hence there should be no national or other preference. Worryingly, some otherwise quite erudite commentators do seem to fall into the blissfully ignorant category! So be very careful when you see phrases such as "national preference". A valid example of a "national preference" would be "mum" versus "mom". Why? No rules are broken, no ambiguities are created, no unnecessary complexity is introduced. "mom" sounds weird to me, "mum" sounds weird to an American, but so what?
By way of fairness and balance can I start off by pointing out that there are sites where you can find examples of the English talking about our own abuses of the language! We Brits are also guilty! A fine example of such is the blog site Stroppy Editor which is subtitled "Minding other people's language. A lot.".
I've many times heard it said that American's were just trying to simplify a complex language. Hmmm! We shall see!
So let's crack on with some specifics....
No. The 'u' is there for a reason. It is a pronunciation indicator. The pronunciation of the endings of "debtor" and "color" are not supposed to be the same, hence "colour" says precisely that, whereas "color" does not. So despite claims to the contrary, the 'u' is not redundant.
Well that would true if the ending of the words concerned was actually 're'. But 're' is not the ending of those words! We need to understand the background to that statement...
Many words are formed by the schema...
<optional prefix><root><ending>.
The <root> part must be inviolate as it carries the base meaning of the word. Consider the following small selection of words from a much bigger family of related words. By what are they related? By the meaning of the common <root>.
| Word | <optional prefix> | <root> | <ending> |
| central | centr | al | |
| centripetal | centr | ipetal | |
| centrifuge | centr | ifuge | |
| concentric | con | centr | ic |
| christocentric | christo | centr | ic |
Clearly each of these words has, as part of their meaning, the sense of "pertaining to the middle". It is also clear that this is because they each contain the inviolate <root> 'centr'.
So, now that we have clearly established how such words are constructed, let's perform the same analysis on the word "centre".
| Word | <optional prefix> | <root> | <ending> |
| centre | centr | e |
obviously, the ending is not 're' but just 'e'! There is no 're' ending to change into 'er'! Therefore, changing "centre" to "center" destroys the <root> and thus also destroys the word's meaning. So, if "center" has lost it's connection with the family of words created from the <root> 'centr', what should it mean? Well, let's use the American's own view of the word, they say the <ending> is 'er', so to stay with that view we must have.......
| Word | <optional prefix> | <root> | <ending> |
| center | cent | er |
The <root> is clearly 'cent', but 'cent' means "pertaining to one hundred or one hundredth" as their currency shows, and 'cent' never ever means "pertaining to the middle". In fact, a word spelt "center" should actually belong to a totally different family of words, here are a few....
| Word | <optional prefix> | <root> | <ending> |
| centigrade | cent | igrade | |
| centurian | cent | urian | |
| percent | per | cent |
The same analysis covers all other such words, for example "spectre", "theatre", etc.
There are two words which are exceptions to the above, but which should not have their spelling changed for a rather different reason. Those words are "metre" and "litre", even though "litre" does not belong to a family of words. These are French words which have been adopted by International Standards bodies as being the names of standard units of measurement. Let's be clear here, that means that everybody is supposed to adopt that usage. "National Preferences" just don't apply. And yet, the USA, with a mere 4% of the world's population, chooses be different, despite that not being a valid option. Having made that change, the USA now has two words which are now ambiguous, "meter" and "meter". You tell me, which one did I intend as a unit of length? Nobody else has that problem.
Dipthongs such as 'æ' and 'œ' are dropped in the USA. But these are also pronunciation guides, as in "manœuver" and "hæmatology". But other dipthongs are not dropped! Very confusing! I thought Americans claimed to be simplifying the language? I don't see how introducing inconsistent changes is in anyway a simplification.
American's ancestors thought there was something difficult about the number of 'l's in a word. This is understandable in so far as many of those ancestors didn't have English as a first language. The problem was seen as being those verbs whose infinitives ended with a single 'l', but whose conjugations doubled that 'l'.
Let's look at what would have been a good solution. Consider "appal". Webster's gives both our "appal" and the American "appall". The latter solves the alleged problem by only changing the infinitive as opposed to all the conjugations and leads to, for example, "appalled". The presence of the second 'l' in "appall" is redundant as far as that word is concerned, but is harmless. More importantly it creates no pronunciation/spelling problems in the conjugations. It does that as it honours vowel softening by preventing it. Don't say you don't understand vowel softening, you understand "pal" and "pale" and "paled", this is precisely the issue. Whereas, if one tries to solve the problem in the way that was done with most other such verbs it does create that problem. For example, "to revel", if you maintain the single 'l' in the conjugations you get a past tense of "reveled". The problem with that is that vowel softening indicates that the pronunciation should be the same as "revealed"! Had they modified that verb (and others) by using the same method as adopted for "appall" the problem doesn't arise as the conjugation would have been "revelled" as in English English and would have kept the spelling and pronunciation rules in step.
So did their forbears simplify the language as they claimed? Absolutely not. Because having created a solution to the number of 'l's which works ("appall"), they inconsistently also invented another totally different method which doesn't work. Having two solutions to the one problem is just confusing and not a simplification. Causing the rules of spelling to diverge from the rules of pronunciation is also not a simplification.
"than" is not synonymous with "from". Proof, we cannot say "other from". We also have to consider that there is a rule that only prepositions etc. which can be validly used with the infinitive of a verb may be used with it's conjugations. So, as we can have "to differ from", but not "to differ than", then all conjugations must also use "from" and not "than". So, it is always "different from", not "different than". Sadly, this error is spreading from the US. Is nobody being taught grammar any more?
When learning a new language, one of the main obstacles is irregular verbs. Heaven knows we bequeathed enough of them to the rest of the world without making more of them by changing perfectly respectable regular verbs into some bastardized irregular form.
One of the commonest, (there others of course) is "to drag". The past tense is obviously "dragged" so there is no valid reason to use "drug" as in "I drug it up the hill". In fact no conjugation of "drag" includes the letters "drug".
It could be argued, if you know your ancient versions of English, that, before "to drug" acquired its modern medicinal usage, it was equivalent to "to drag" and they are using a conjugation of that ancient verb. However, that does not work either as it is also a regular verb, hence we do not say "I drug him" we say "I drugged him". So that explanation would require that "to drug" to be both regular and irregular, which is clearly not possible.
The phrase "above average" contains no indication of ethical values. Therefore, it is possible to be "above averagely evil". Similarly, "below average" could mean "below averagely evil". So, "good" is not a synonym of "above average" and ""bad" is not a synonym of "below average". Hence, to say you performed better than average, you have to say "I did well", not "I did good" due to "good" and "above average" not being synonymous. Similarly one has to say "I did badly" not "I did bad".
A more general version of the previous item is the failure to use adverbs. Other parts of speech are, by definition, not adverbs and yet they keep being used instead of adverbs. Is this laziness or is the language just badly taught? This almost always occurs by simply omitting a necessary 'ly'. For example, "He ran off quick". Nope. "He ran off quickly". Yup. I don't understand how people can take so little pride in what they do when doing it properly is so simple. But again, there is a tendency for this to be spreading outside of the US.
For example "a couple of aspirin". "a couple" is just a different way of saying "two" and if you said two then you would have made asprin plural. Changing the way you represent a number doesn't stop it being a number and all numbers have to be treated identically. Hence, correct is "a couple of aspirins". This can also occur with abbreviations, the most notable being "math". "Mathematics" is a word which is plural but has no singular form. That means there are two reasons why "math" is wrong. 1) the plural indicator has to be maintained and 2) you can't abbreviate a word which does not exist, to whit "mathematic", hence "maths", the way we say it, is correct.
Consider "the current market value on the house". Whilst we "put a value on" it is not "value" that "on" relates to, i.e. is paired with, it relates to "put" as in "put xxx on". So what should "value" be paired with when such a pairing is needed? Well, we have "the value of prayer", "the value of love", "the value of money" and as we don't bugger around with pairings, the example should be "the current market value of the house".
This section is subtitled, "on and in are not the same". Apparently, if one wishes to buy a snack in the US one may order such as "chicken salad on wheat". Let's skip that one could simply say "bread", or even "wheat bread", which has the advantage of avoiding accidentally referring to other wheat based products. Concentrate instead on the word "on". What should that mean? Well usually you might expect it to mean "on top of". Hence one might expect a chicken salad served on top of a single slice of bread. No. What you would get is a chicken salad sandwich. Let's skip that it could have been more accurately specified as a chicken salad sandwich, concentrate on where the chicken salad is to be found. It is found inside the sandwich. Hence anyone applying any sort of simple logic would say the salad is "in" the sandwich. Which means you would expect the original description to have been "chicken salad in wheat". Given that "in" and "on" do not mean the same thing, how on earth can the original description have come about?
The word "route" is pronounced as we do when applied to roads, for example, "get your kicks on Route 66", but when applied to say gridiron football it is pronounced as though it was "rout". Why? The meaning hasn't changed, it is still the path (mathematical sense of path) between two points. So one word has two different pronunciations despite having only one meaning! Does that make sense? I think not! More simplifying the language eh? Not.
US sports statistics contain a plethora of values they call percentages. This is complete and utter nonsense as not one of them is a percentage! They are fractions. Take the so-called "wins percentage" in baseball. They calculate "games won / games played". Clearly a fraction. Clearly not a percentage. Why not? Let us look at the word. <per><cent>. <per> has its normal meaning of "for each" and <cent> has its normal meaning of "hundred", so the word literally means "for each hundred". Can you spot anything to do with hundreds in any of the statistics they use? No. So they are ipso facto not percentages. You have to multiply by a 100 to make a fraction into a percentage. This is trivial schoolboy arithmetical knowledge! And they universally get it wrong! So where they give a value of say .540, to be a percentage that has to become 54%. And gosh, that actually looks like a percentage!
Yes I know. These concepts are very closely related. But that doesn't make them the same. "Very closely related" is absolutely not "the same", hence they are not interchangeable. One more thing, Webster's does not confirm the sports usage!
But there is another reason why "percentage" is the wrong word to be using! If we want to represent 50% as a decimal fraction then we might write it as ".5" yes? Fine. If we were to put it into a table of such values which go down to 3 digits of precision, then to be consistent we would write ".500", yes? So far so good. We are on the same page thus far. It's still fifty percent or point five though isn't it? But that isn't what US sports fans say! No, they say five hundred! That can only mean the figure relates to 1,000, as 500 is half of 1000. That is not per hundred, which is what percent means, it is per thousand. So again, the word "percent" is being totally misused.
That should mean that if I ask a US sports fan for an interest free $1000 loan to be paid back 100%, then I only need to pay back $100! Well, .100 x $1000 is $100. As a sports statistic they call ".100" both a percentage and 100, so as it carries both those names then ".100" must stand for 100% as that is what having both names means! That's what happens when you claim that unique terms are actually interchangeable.
"Jewelry"! It's in Webster's but it is an appalling word. It is unnecessary as we already have words that cover all the meanings we need. If you check Webster's you will see the original word "jewellery" is also there, It has a meaningful structure <jeweller><y> which by adding the 'y' indicates "that which is produced by a <jeweller>". "Jewelry", on the other hand, tells us no such thing. It looks like it is merely an attempt to legitimize sloppy pronunciation.
Then there is "flatware". This actually means cutlery. What exactly was wrong with cutlery? Cutlery was traditionally made by a cutler. That's why it is called cutlery. It is not made by a flatter, largely because there is no such thing. Nor can it be claimed to be in any way a descriptive name. How much soup do we think a soup spoon would hold if it were actually flat? Ridiculous. And yet some people over here in the UK have started using the word because it sounds cool (they claim)! And if it is sometimes made of plastic, so what? That is no more misleading than calling something which is not flat "flat".
"Situate(d)" is used in ways it was never intended to be, which is ridiculous as in virtually all cases a simpler word already exists. For example, "Once she was situated in front of the computer...." when "sat", "stood", etc would work perfectly well and are far mote precise.
"Stand in line", whatever was wrong with "queue" or "queuing"? Both are shorter to write/type/say.
"Uptick"! Umm, why? "upturn" already existed and did the job perfectly. Did the inventor of this one not know "upturn".
"Survailed". The verb "to survey" has amongst it's flavours the meaning *to watch". Hence, one might ask "are we being watched" if survailance is the context. Survailance is clearly a noun derived from the verb, but there is no need to derive a spurious verb from the noun. "are we being watched" clearly carries the context of survailance so a separate verb is unnecessary.
Invented American technical words and phrases! For example, from the NASA moon shots, "extra-vehicular implement container" instead of just "toolbox", or "external toolbox". You could fill a book with these.
Invented American marketing words and phrases! For example, "incentivise" instead of the existing "motivate". You could also fill a book with these.
"To" and "too". Some Americans seem to have no idea which to use despite them having completely different meanings! Sometimes they even use one in a particular context and then use the other when the identical context recurs! (I've done proof reading for Americans remember and I've lost count of how many times I've had to correct these!)
"Your" and "you're". Similarly they have no idea that "your" is not short for "you are"! They do it even when the "'re" is essential in order to provide the only verb in a sentence, given that a valid sentence has to contain at least <noun><verb> or <verb><noun>. (I've lost count of the times I've had to correct this too.)
"Whomever". Webster's only has "whomsoever", but Wiktionary gives both! Maybe it's because I use "whomsoever", but I think it sounds nicer.
In an online Codeword puzzle from the U.S. I came across NIMBI. We have the word NIMBY, but before anyone rushes to say "national preference", it can't be because NIMBY is an acronym. It stands for "Not In My Back Yard". So is NIMBI something else entirely (what?), a national mistake or a mistake by the setter of the puzzle? Help please.
And I suspect this list is far from exhaustive! One conclusion is obvious, the common claim of simplification is clearly false.