Non Americans: Does seeing American English bother you?

[emeraldrafael]

No, not raelly. Its starts to bother me once you start using gangster english, where there's a bunch of commas and a's at the end of words where you should have different letters.

I just see it as laziness, and laziness like that bothers me.

 

[Castian Blake]

by starting with "American english" even from here its wrong and highly unneducated.
Theres no such thing!
America its the whole continent, not just the US.
Same to refering the USA as "America" or its ppl "Americans" which technically they are, but not in the sense they refer to.

 

[Bento Box]

I'm a yank*, and I spell all those words with the optional 'u' intact. Makes folks less likely to jump to the easy conclusion that I'm a half-witted republican or something.

*I just outed myself, so I can expect to be ostracized by the international community now.

 

[Kirk Sabre]

As a Canadian, we kinda get both sides. If I remember correctly, we're taught the traditional UK way of spelling (colour, favourite, etc) in school, but once you get into high school, it doesn't really matter. Caught between the two as we are, either seems like a viable option.

Most elect to stick with the American spelling purely because of the lack of letters. One less thing to remember, right? But all Government documents are required by law to use UK spellings (Not that I've ever seen a Government document as what your favourite colour is).

To be honest, in personal use I'll swap between the two. Not in the same document (hopefully), but it just depends on whether I'm typing a paper for school or jotting a note to myself.

To quote Eddie Izzard on American spelling: "But you spell "through" T-H-R-U, and I'm with you on that. Because we spell it "thruff". And that's trying to cheat at Scrabble."

 

[daydreamerdeluxe]

also i prefer non american spelling with alot of words. you dont need to replace every s with a z like in organisation or generalise. but i do prefer jail instead of gaol

Actually, words like organization and generalize were actually the original spelling, and it's actually a relatively new thing in England to spell them with an "s". That's our change, the Americans get it the same.

It's kinda like how the American pronunciation of "garage" is closer to its French origins than the short a in the Brits version of it. Sometimes, they HAVEN'T changed it, the English did instead.

 

[Vrach]

Doesn't really bother me. I use UK English for the most part, but use Americanised spelling here and there, mostly because I'm too used to it (though I'm aiming at changing to UK English as I prefer the way it's spelled and I'm a bit of a Brit fanboi tbf ).

 

[gobby400]

It Only Annoys me When People Tell Me I'm Wrong for spelling it the way is right in England. dosent happen to me much because I still live in England though. Not really worth getting bothered, there much more fun stuff to complain about.

 

[gobby400]

I see quite a bit of the "proper" spellings of words on this site (oweing, I'm sure, to the large non-American presence) and it makes me wonder, when you see us Amies spell words like "color" and "favorite" as such instead of the "proper" "colour" and "favourite" does it bother you at all or is it just another way of spelling?

For me, when I see "colour", it catches my attention only slightly more than "color" but I've been told been told it really bothers people to see it spelled one way or the other.

Nah. I can do it one way or the other.

American accents however? Different kettle of fish. For some reason, men with American accents are wonderfully sexy, but women with American accents make me want to suicide off the nearest cliff. God. How 90% of American women sound nasally and really draw out their words. And pitch their voices so that sarcastic statements sound like questions.

Also. It always bothered me how slowly most Americans speak. I speak quickly and my sentences are unbroken, so speaking to someone who speaks slowly (something I had a hard time tolerating whilst in the US) and peppers their sentences with pauses, words drawn out to fill the space and "uh"s is like nails on a chalkboard for me.

God that went off topic.

I Agree, the US accent makes my skin crawl, and they talk really slowly.

 

[Krantos]

Non-French: Does it bother you to see French?

Normally, I don't jump to my country's defense (especially grammatically), but American English is called that for a reason. It's a dialect with its roots in UK English (which I'll add is a derivative of several other European languages).

The way we spell things isn't wrong. It's actually correct in our dialect.

 

[scott91575]

Actually the 'u' words don't bother me.


It's when I see "gray" that I get upset D:<

It's kind of weird. I'm an American, yet I've always spelled it "grey." "Gray" just doesn't look, or feel, right to me.

Both are accepted forms in American English.

To flip it a little, the only British thing that annoys me is Lieutenant pronounced leftenent (which is of course pronunciation, not spelling). The word has it origins in French, and when broken up is lieu and tenant. Do British people use the phase "in lieu" of something, which means "in place" of something? If they do, do they say "in lef" of something? I understand there was some old English spelling that used an f (which I believe was based on an incorrect interpretation of the old French word), but it seems that should have been corrected a long time ago.

As for the differences, British spellings don't annoy me so I don't know why English spellings should annoy anyone.

You must really hate "Colonel" being pronounced "Kernel," then. I know I find it a bit ... odd.

Colonel cannot be broken up into two words. There is no word colo where when used alone it's pronounced "coro" in American English. If that was the case, yeah, it would annoy me. Besides, no one pronounces colonel like the base latin word colonella. There is no r in there. So both British and American are a bastardization of the word.

It's not that the word doesn't sound phonetic. It's the fact lieu and tenant are used in English, but when combined lieu becomes lef.

 

[thylasos]

I'm not bothered by it, to be honest. I don't use a spell-checker, so I'm not being prompted to write US English at any stage, and it doesn't affect my own spelling, though as for all of us in the non-American anglophone world, Americanisms may well slip into my speech and informal writing. Not spellings, mind.

 

[Rodrigo Girao]

I'm okay with American spelling, but damnit, people, stop using Fred Flintstone units already!

 

[Faladorian]

Actually the 'u' words don't bother me.


It's when I see "gray" that I get upset D:<

I'm an American and I spell it "Grey." It just looks a trillion times better.

As for the rest (colour, armour, etc.) you can blame Webster.

The whole point of changing the spelling of the words was to feel separate from the British and instill nationalism. It's really stupid, I don't see why if we can call it "English" (That's England, English) we couldn't just speak the same language.

I can understand that it's a separate dialect over here, but the spelling thing was on purpose.

 

[fulano]

I use the americanized way of spelling. I'm fine with it. I see no need to set any kind of "internet standard" other than to spell properly what you are trying to spell.

For example: 'Color' and 'colour' are the same thing, but 'color' wins in my book because a) It is written exactly how it is written in spanish; and b) it has one less chaarcter.

 

[Kinokohatake]

Wow a lot of nationalistic pissing and moaning about how one country doesn't use extra letters in certain words. No we aren't wrong, we are different. Big deal. Just because the US started off as a dumping ground for British crazies doesn't mean that 200+ years later that we have to use the exact same alphabet. Honestly people with british accents sound awful to me. Just terrible. Not really but if you are british and got offended by that last sentence then perhaps you should not say someone sounds bad because of their country of origin.


FUCK THE "U"!

 

[Anthony Ferguson]

I really dont mind when i see someone spelling in the americanised version of english, but like everyone else here it seems, i would definitely rage if someone ignorantly told me i was wrong.

I prefer proper english, I think the american version seems dumbed down. I am also not fond of the spellcheck lines showing up under correct words

 

[Badassassin]

The I have to tell them its the Americans that swapped it for god knows what reason.

It dates back to the Revolution. Because the States were originally English colonies they were essentially displaced Englishmen when the war ended. So over the intervening years between the end of the Revolution and the War of 1812, Americans changed spellings and small things to separate themselves from the British and give themselves a unique nationality.

It's actually a pretty interesting piece of history if that interests you.

I understand why they did it but it doesn't excuse the fact that it is stupid. I mean realise/realize...WHY?!?!!? If Australia becomes a republic I doubt that will happen. Even words like armour/armor...They realise that armor should be pronounced ar-mor. Considering English is the formation of several languages (German, Latin, French, Italian etc) and amore (Pronounce A-Mor-E (Italian)) is the closest resemblance to armor therefore armor is just wrong.

I REALISE that most of the English language is made up of inconsistencies and breaks its own rules (i before e except after c) but the Americans didn't have to make it worse.

Do you realise how tortuous it is living in Aus and being confused over how a word is spelt (I JUST HAD TO CHECK THAT I HAD SPELT RIGHT!!!!)? I have to use spell checker on computers just to make sure I'm not using American spelling, it doesn't help that spell checkers are by default set to American. I've lost marks for my Psych Essays because of it.

It is just really petty in my opinion. Changing things like that just doesn't make sense.


I'm sorry, but it was a petty move by the Americans and really doesn't help anyone at all. They just made the English language worse than it was.

You are visibly upset sir. Obviously it's not petty to you because if it was you wouldn't give a damn.

I'm American. I don't really see the big deal. Why all the butthurt?