Comments on: Variant Spellings

By: Kada McDonald

Kada McDonald — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 04:42:21 +0000

I remember when first moving to America that I was completely frustrated with the spellchecker for a full half an hour… until I thought to look up an American dictionary. I *knew* I was spelling travelled correctly, but it kept insisting I was spelling it wrong. So many knew ways to learn to spell words. I’d known about the o – ou, and re – er differences, but not the ll – l. Learn something new everyday!

Took me a good five years after first reading the word to realise what bangs meant the same thing as fringe.

Language is fun!

Thanks for the thoughts, Deanna, glad to know it’s not just us poor immigrants that have problems with the language. ;)

By: fionagh

fionagh — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:41:27 +0000

My name is Fiona Avery and I’m a writer guilty of loving “grey” over “gray.” (Hi, Fiona!)

But it’s because I grew up knowing Canadian / British spelling over American. To the poster who said they really hate that – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Don’t kill us!

But when you hear “gray” pronounced in your mind, doesn’t it sound different compared to “grey?” Like: graaaieeeyyyy. But if you see “grey” doesn’t it feel more understated, perhaps more distinguished? So, say I’m writing a European period piece, sometimes “grey” just seems more appropriate even though I know the American dictionary says differently and I will ask if it’s all right for the editors to leave it as “grey.”

And while I know that today I live in America, I just … I can’t do it! I can’t go “gray” … it’s a failing on my part. But there you have it. If I can help it, I try to make my manuscripts use “grey” when I can. I also know other “grey”-lovers and we meet secretly. I also love “honour” and “colour” more than our u-less varieties. And I love “theatre” over “theater” anyday. But I’d never get to put that in print over here so I don’t even ask. I just secretly practice writing those in the dark.

By: msevilwoman

msevilwoman — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:33:07 +0000

He was one of the authors I was thinking about when I wrote that comment. I love those differences . . .

By: deannahoak

deannahoak — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:18:00 +0000

Yeah, when the words give a different “feel” to a book, I sometimes think it’s better to leave the British spelling; we’ve left it for the last few of China’s books, for example.

By: deannahoak

deannahoak — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:16:06 +0000

Many publishers consider towards, backwards, etc. to be British English. Those words are very common in American English, though, and I hear them all the time in the South.

By: deannahoak

deannahoak — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:12:07 +0000

The dictionary will help with this, particularly if a word is mentioned in a synonomy paragraph.

By: deannahoak

deannahoak — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:08:58 +0000

You can instruct the comp to change the quotes without copyediting the book over again, which may have happened….

But with archaeologue, I would bet that the word would have withstood copyediting anyway; it isn’t common in British usage either and adds antiquarian to the interpretation, so it sounds like a very deliberate authorial choice to me. (I haven’t read the book, but the word immediately sets my copyeditor senses tingling that way. :-))

By: johnjosephadams

johnjosephadams — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 01:01:51 +0000

Oh, I hate that. “Gray” vs. “grey” is just American vs. English spellings, right? But it does annoy me to see American manuscripts use grey. No, I don’t know why this is, but it’s true.

Also, correct me if I’m wrong on this one, but in American English, “toward” is always “toward” and never “towards,” correct? And in British English, the opposite is true, right? I’m not sure if the same is true of other “-ward” words, such as backward, forward, etc.

By: johnjosephadams

johnjosephadams — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:58:50 +0000

This comment reminds me of an unusual choice of wording in Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan. The book was originally published in the UK, but was re-typeset. I don’t know if that automatically means that it was re-copyedited or not. The thing is, they did take the trouble to change all the single quotes to double quotes like we Americans like, but they left “archaeologist” as “archaeologue,” which I presume is the British way of saying archaeologist. It seemed a very odd thing to leave in there to me, since most Americans probably never even heard that variant before.

This doesn’t make any sense to me; why would you bother to change the *quotes* which certainly don’t matter, but leave an odd word choice like that in there?

By: johnwrt1

johnwrt1 — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 12:43:37 +0000

How do you tackle the problem of a word whose connotation makes the word a poor choice? Where do you go for a words connotation?