British or American spelling?

[HAK3180]

1 hour ago, Inno said:

I'm an American, but UK English is certainly more preferable. It has a texture and life to it that US English, with it's (rather wasted and inconsistent) efforts to smooth out the "rough edges" does not.

So does UK English call for an apostrophe in the possessive form of the word "it"?

[Inno]

1 minute ago, HAK3180 said:

So does UK English call for an apostrophe in the possessive form of the word "it"?

No, but when using Swype on my phone, that's what it defaults to, and I didn't pay enough attention to notice. Are you sure you cannot find anything else in my prior post that would enable you to continue being a pedantic sod?

[HAK3180]

@Inno, oh, I just found your post rather ironic. Nice comeback though.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

20 hours ago, Memfis said:

Colour/defence/pressurise or color/defense/pressurize

I would use the latter forms of all of those, but on the other hand...

 

Grew up in the US, but I suppose being homeschooled and reading a lot of British authors as a kid gave me a more... fluid conception of the boundaries between spelling dialects.  I kind of ended up with my own bastardized mixture that I'm largely unashamed of.

• Always grey (unless it's a name or something)
• Usually sabre and spectre, but never centre; saber is more bound in my mind to specific contexts like lightsaber or the saber class in Fate than as a generic term for the weapon (theater/theatre I guess is a word I don't use often enough to have formed a strong leaning on; either looks fine to me.)
• Always diarrhoea, if only because it's the one I can remember with certainty as being a correct spelling, so screw it if someone thinks it's not the correct spelling
• Sometimes humour; this is one I seem to have not fully settled on one way or the other.  I suspect when dealing with medieval conceptions on personality types I'd always use the U, but when saying something is funny it's a little more undecided.  All other -our spellings look somewhat weird to me though, like they ought to make an "oor" sound as in French "amour".
• Someone mentioned cancelled and travelled earlier and uh, I thought those were the only correct forms.
• Sometimes arse, if it makes a comedic context funnier, but typically ass otherwise.  These are more like two that I see as being almost but not quite the same word (probably helped by that they're also not pronounced the same, as far as I know).

Probably US spellings otherwise, in particular "-ise" in place of "-ize" looks fairly wrong to my eye.  I wonder if this relates to spoken dialect since "-ize" is definitely closer to how I'd say it out loud.

 

I suspect, if open internet access across borders (or any new tech with similar effects) remains a thing, that English or at least particularly written English is going to naturally re-homogenize over the next couple centuries, especially since more respondents here already say they use a mix than I anticipated.  (Sure, some will try to fight it, but they probably won't matter any more than the pedants we have today who whine about things like "app" or the use of "they" as a gender-neutral.)

[Manuel-K]

The most horrible mixture is committed by German sports journalists/players/wannabe experts on television. They keep saying “sie haben gekämpft und gefightet” (they fought and fought). I'm not sure if they feel like they have subject the verb fight to German grammar rules of if they ran out of synonyms, but it's impossible to watch a soccer game on TV without hearing that sentence (or something very close).

 

That's only one example, but it's a very common one during the world cup.

 

Like @ETTiNGRiNDER, I'm sure that the barrier between AE and BE disappear completely.

 

Another weird issue that's all over the place in Germany is that most people seem to stop using hyphens (very, very important in German if you don't want to concatenate nouns directly). I blame smart phones and the suggested corrections by search engines and spell checkers that suggest splitting all compound words.

[insertwackynamehere]

British spelling is the fedora of prose.

[Poncho]

Being half-British, I'm more accustomed to UK English, and I honestly prefer it to US English. For example, the word "colour" should have a "u" in it, otherwise it'd sound like "cul - OR". US English, in this regard, seems a little inconsistent as well, since the word "famous" has a "u" (and the "ou" sound is virtually the same as the "o" sound in "favorite").

 

Though, there are a couple of US English terms I think one-up UK terms. The word "lieutenant" in UK English is written the same, but pronounced "left-tenant", which just seems stupid. I also like to write the word "lightsaber" in the US style. I know, I'm a picky person. :P

[DooMAD]

As a Brit who spent a few years living in Canada, there are maybe a couple of words where I prefer the Americanised spelling, but not many.  

 

"Skeptic", "tire" and "kilometer/meter/millimeter/etc" are the main ones.  I don't think I have a preference for "theater" vs "theatre", so I probably use those interchangeably without even realising.  Lightsaber too.

[LobsterBoy]

If it's formal, professional, cover letter/email or a college essay: 100% British Spelling

 

If it's informal message, or casual typing: 50/50. Where I am, using both American or British (or using a blend of both) is socially acceptable. 

[Grimosaur]

Everytime I see 'mum' spelled as 'mom' I say it exactly like that, mOm.

[insertwackynamehere]

The weirdest British spelling to me is “maths” and when I first encountered it online over 10 years ago, I just thought the people using that phrase were doing cutesy baby talk as some sort of joke (in-line with asterisks around narrated actions and fake stammering). Sometimes it seemed really out of place to the point of being passive aggressive (like when someone acts really condescending with baby talk). It cleared up a lot of things when I realized for some reason the Brits just pluralize the shortened form or I guess Americans depluralize it to be fair. Still, I cannot read “maths” normally, I still hear it in my head as an American talking to their significant other in a cutesy voice.

[Pure Hellspawn]

I actually tend to use both, but as an American I may lean more towards the American way. I have said the word maths as well as colour before.

 

Edit: I used to play Runescape which is a British MMORPG now owned by the Chinese. Quit, but still got some British spelling out of it.

Edited July 6, 2018 by Pure Hellspawn

[MFG38]

I'm a non-native speaker that prefers the American way over the British one.

 

I seem to be an exception among my friends in that regard.