I expect that this has been asked bbefore here, as it’s the kind of thing tht would come up, but I couldn’t find it using TSDMB’s search function. I’m just wondering about how the practice of dropping the U from many words, (honour, valour etc.) occured. Was it done all in one go, or was it only created as the standard after people just started to spelll words that way?
It’s thanks to Teddy Roosevelt. He liked to reform things… He reformed the meat packing industry, he reformed the rules to American Football and he also reformed American English…
He was a very poor speller. He never went to a conventional school until he entered Harvard. He was sickly so had tutors. If you’re gonna be sickly, at least try to be rich and sickly! 
He also spoke and read most of the historical languages, Latin, Greek, etc. But he got fed up with struggling to remember where to put all the 'u’sand silent 'g’s and things the Queen’s English is so full with.
“The result was that he issued an executive order directing the Government Printing Office to adopt a list of 300 reformed spellings recommended by the Simplified Spelling Board. He further directed that his report to Congress for 1906 be printed and distributed in the reformed system. Had this order stuck, US government documents, including the decisions of the Supreme Court, would have been issued in a reformed system starting in 1907.” -extract from H.W. Brand’s, T.R.: The Last Romantic, pp. 555-558
But what happened is everyone got quite pissed at ol’ Teddy. Newspapers made derisive comments, Congress was up in arms, and the Supreme Court refused to use the reformed spellings. The best one is when the New York Times said that any government publication that used the reformed spellings would be treated as misspelled and corrected! Ha!
Teddy rescinded the order. But his reforms were pushed to the spotlight and gradully made the shift into the common lexicon.
Noah Webster (1758 - 1843) did much of the spelling changes. He wanted to make the written language reflect the spoken language so he dropped many letters from words. He almost went to extremes and many of his spellings didn’t take. Plus many Americans wanted to differentiate themselves from the British after the Revolution. Other changes have occurred gradually since this is a living, evolving language.
Here’s an excerpt from the OED under honour, honor:
Swede’s right – it was Noah Webster, who was also responsible for saving Americans from “gaol” and “waggon”.
Teddy Roosevelt was part of a later wave of spelling reform around 1900; most of these changes didn’t stick. (Although I believe the CHICAGO TRIBUNE persisted in spelling “through” as “thru” up until the 1970s.)
While there’s constant debate between the US and the UK as to which spelling is “correct,” people always seem to miss the more obvious spelling defect in the word. Given modern pronunciation, there’s no real reason to spell it with an “H”!
I say, spell it “onor.” (Which was the original spelling anyway, according to the OED.)
Onnur.
No, onor! (Well, at least it gives us something new to fight about.)
Well, “onor” was originally a French spelling, and we don’t need no damn Frenchies telling us how to spell! How 'bout we move the “h” and go with “onhor”?
We also have centre/center.
But my favorite of the British/American spelling differences is the word “dependent.”
In British English, “dependent” is the adjective and “dependant” is the noun.
In American English, both adjective and noun are “dependent”, and “dependant” is misspelling.
Nothing drives my English teacher crazier than me, and these english spellings. Colour, Shoppe, honour. She can’t say that you’re wrong, but it manages to get her up the wall…
She offered her honor –
he honored her offer –
after that it was on 'er, off 'er all night long
On both sides of the Atlantic you can find specific businesses that use the Shoppe spelling in their name, as in “Ye Olde Candle Shoppe”, but does anyone actually use the shoppe spelling when referring to shops in general?
I’ve noticed Americans tend to say “store” where Brits say “shop”, but that’s another discussion.
No.
Just think of all the time school-kids (one hour each day, at least 8 years of schooling) would save if spelling were “self-contained” as is, for example, Spanish. “Spell it as you say it,” would be the rule.
Think of all those extra hours that would be available for potential future astronauts! We could be on Mars in years rather than waiting for Decades!!
Spelling reform got a big boost from William Randolph Hearst in the 30’s. He was a big supporter and all of his papers used simplified spelling. He can be blamed for the general acceptance of “color” and “honor”, and the limited acceptance of “thru”. People couldn’t quite swallow things like “skool,” though.
Personally, spelling reform advocates make me want to skreem.
But then you get into the fight of how you should pronounce things. Tomato (Toe-May-Toe or Toe-Ma-Toe), Roof (Ruuf or ruff), often (offen or off-ten). There would also be differences from regional dialects.
Potatoe.
The Simplified Spelling Society has been promoting the cause of spelling reform for many years.
One of the major flaws of spelling reform is that it ties the spelling of a word too closely to it’s pronunciation.
Pronunciation is very fluid and varies considerably from generation to generation. If everything was spelled phonetically, written English would be undecipherable to most people after an interval of a couple of hundred years. (Think of how much easier it is to read Chaucer than to recite it.)
If I were going to reform written language, I go in the other direction altogether, and completely divorce the written word from the pronunciation, in favour of an ideogrammatical renderering like Chinese. Because their written language is much more stable, most chinese people can read writing that is over two-thousand years old, although only a few scholars know anything about the old spoken dialects. Comparatively, most English speakers wouldn’t even recognize written English from 600 years ago as being their own language. Consequently, asian people have a better chance at a sense of historical continuity.
That being said, I think that preserving the written word as we have it is the best option-- Usually, you can look at an unfamiliar word and determine its meaning by its spelling, without being misled by homophones:
If you say that someone is a scholastic, the spelling tells you that it has some connection to school, while someone enountering the word for the first time and relying on phonetic connections might assume that you are saying the person is a bonehead. 
That’s one word I’ve ALWAYS had trouble with! Both have always looked right to me, and I always have to really think about which one to use! I tend to stick to dependent now, thanks to my CEGEP calculus prof, but come to think of it, he’s American:)