Gray Is The Color

It has become commonly accepted that Britain and the USA are divided by a common language. We have a multitude of different words for everyday items and even when we have the same word, the spelling is often different.

There is an excellent English – American dictionary here: http://english2american.com/ - it shows the meanings of English words that Americans do not understand… does the average New Yorker really not know what a dressing gown is?

The English get enormously self-righteous about this. How dare they steal our language and then alter it? Colour has a ‘u’ damn it and it’s aluminium with two ‘i’s!

The trouble is twofold. Firstly, there would be a lot of different dialects and spellings just within the UK if it weren’t for standardisation from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). What to some is a cob is to others a roll and yet others a balm cake – just a simple one that changes within about 50 miles.

Dan Quayle - master of American lexicography...

Secondly, those people who need a tall ladder when they finally get off their high horses don’t always know the facts. Let’s take two examples of “bad” American spelling – gray and enterprize (I wish my spell-check would stop changing it back).

Grey is more widely used in the UK, while gray is preferred in the USA. The confusion arises from the Old English word which was graeg, hence we have gray and grey, some might argue it should be graey. Further, while in 1930 the Times newspaper always used the term gray, other papers used grey - some British people even used grey to describe a paler tint than gray. A search through history finds both spellings in use after 1300. Even the great Dr Johnson argued that it should be gray.

Both grey and gray are acceptable – it isn’t just because all Americans are stupid that they went for gray as the standard, but rather that the OED chose grey while Webster’s chose gray.

As for Enterprize, there is considerable evidence of the use of that spelling in the UK. Indeed HMS Enterprize fought in the American War of Independence (yes, on the British side!)

The differences in spelling are numerous, but are often easily explained by examining the facts – in the early days of the English language, words had multiple spellings. That is why Dr Johnson decided to sort things out. “Correct” spelling today is merely standardisation taken from early examples (many of them from Shakespeare who spelled his own name in a variety of ways). That standardisation was carried out in the UK by the OED and in the USA by Webster’s who chose different bases for their standards. Americans aren’t just lazy in dropping the occasional ‘u’ – they think it is correct and they have as much right to do so as we do. After all, how many foreign words have we taken and Anglicised? Orange anyone?

The final point is that we (the British) don’t mind taking an American-invented word and using it too much. ‘Gangster’ was invented in the USA, as was ‘geek’ as was (believe it or not) ‘hello.’ Allegedly it was Thomas Edison who took the word ‘hullo’ and used it as a greeting over the telephone – prior to that ‘hullo’ had been a word of surprise, as in “Hullo, what’s going on here?” The spelling was then altered to ‘hello’ and one of our commonest words was born. (As a side-note Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the phone, didn’t like ‘hello’ and tried to get ‘Ahoy-Ahoy’ used as the standard greeting – as used today by Monty Burns in the Simpsons…)

The conclusion to be drawn is that both Americans and Brits spell correctly – in their own places. We must use the correct spelling for our audience – if the intended audience is in America then American spelling is correct and likewise for the UK.

So, turn off the fawcets, pop your new drapes in the trunk, hop in your gray colored truck and mind you don’t have a fender bender…

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