“is that we stayed on the Continent. And never mind that I had to get into a knock-down drag-out fight with Jack in order to get him to stay in France for more than three nights after he decided he didn’t like Paris: but I’ll remember that night in the countryside—and, oh, Gosh, the food, for the rest of my life. We didn’t make it to Italy, though of course I got to Rome years later with the spouse. But it seems like almost a crime to me that I haven’t been to Ireland, Scotland, or—in the most bizarre instance of all, given who I am—England.”
“Well,” he suggests, “why don’t you take a sabba . . . oh. That won’t work.”
“Nope. But I can save up for it now, and go sometime when I’m in between gigs.”
Maybe I can even get some work there, if I study up a bit on British style guides. I’m sure there’s a bit more to it than adding a “u” to every other wourd and placing the punctuation outside of the quotation marks.*
*Naturally, I’m joking. But just in case any Commonwealth copy editors are reading, I think the globalisation of language makes it imperative that we come up with a trans-Atlantic style sheet (or call it Canadian-American, or Australian-American, if you like) that creates an internet-friendly form of “compromise English.”
I should probably run an advert on my sidebar, asking for help with this project.
There will always be arbitrary divisions in language—each magazine has its own preferred published style guide (AP, Chicago, Words into Type [and its foodie cousin, Recipes into Type]) as well as its own “house style” (which generally reflects the preferences of its editor and/or managing editor, along with, sometimes, division heads and editorial directors).
And every one has its own dictionary-of-first-resort (e.g., Web 10—the online version is Web 11), as well as a backup “fat dictionary” (I like one by Random House).
But the fact that Americans vs. Commonwealth/Commonwealth-affiliated nations spell things differently as least 40 per cent of the time? Brilliant.
It has got to stop; we must organize these bobbles and bits of language enough to make English closer to coherent.
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Tsk, LMA – we must organiSe these bobbles and bits
Seriously – I work with many Commonwealth countries (which account for one-third of the world’s population), and there is a great deal of confusion between English-English and Microsoft-Spellcheck-English (OK, then, American English). It’s even worse for English Speakers of Other Language as globally they outnumber English speakers 3:1. So, you have students attending, say, an ESOL course run by a UK-based organisation (such as the University of Cambridge), but doing homework on their PCs at home in MS Word, which by default checks for American English.
Personally, the color/colour organise/organize thing I am pretty sanguine about (I’m not an ESOL student, though) – it’s the abbreviation of things like ‘Mister’ and ‘Doctor’ that grates, for some odd reason: over here, if the abbreviation ends in the same letter that the abbreviated word ends in, there is no period. So it’s ‘Dr’ and ‘Mr’ but ‘Prof.’ and ‘Hon.’
As we invented the language I’m hoping my septic cousins will see the error of their ways and adopt the Queen’s (or, indeed, the Commonwealth’s) language!