It was a luckier soul who moored his vessel in a marina in the South Seas, and as it was just in time for Christmas he hired a firm of decorators to come and, aha, “spruce up” his ship for the season. However, there was a similarly-rigged yacht moored elsewhere in the marina and the decorators carelessly set about their work on this one by mistake. So when our hero spotted what was going on, he tipped a small boy to cycle down to the marina and tell the decorators that they were treeing-up the wrong barque.
As I understand, it would be used as in “a two-storyed house.”
Wouldn’t that be spelt ‘storeyed’ or ‘storied’?
I think gaol is old-fashioned.
I remember an Oscar Wilde poem about Reading Gaol.
Also there’s a road in my historic market town called Gaol Street, but the local prison is a jail.
Surely ‘realise’ is typical English?
I would accept realize, but assume the writer was American…
I would say that I live in a two storey house. Or my house has two storeys.
(Also we Brits have ground floors, beneath the first floor…)
There is also a Gaol Lane in Sudbury, Suffolk.
The British spelling I love is connexion. We only have boring old connection here in the States, and I think that odd “x” is fascinating.
The British spelling I can do without is “metre”. By itself it’s OK – that wayward “-tre” is interesting if nonintuitive, like the one at the end of “theater”. ut then you can run into confusion whether you should use “-metre” or “-meter” at the end of a word (Ohmmeter? Ohmmetre? Kilometer? Kilometre?) Better just to have all of them end in “-meter” and not worry about it.
Huh? Where have you seen it spelt that way?
Several Penguin editions I have. I don’t recall which ones, though.
Aha, ‘connexion’ is the Old French spelling. And does perhaps crop up in old editions, or in older literature itself. But it’s not everyday usage.
Well, they were Penguin editions, but “connexion” wasn’t appearing in olf text – it was on the cover blurbs and in the forwards as well. Someone at Penguin must love the old forms.
The youth employment organization here in Nottinghamshire is called Connexions So that spelling is still around.
We never, ever use Defense - it’s always Defence - but do differentiate between Licence (the noun) and License (the verb). The same goes for Practice and Practise. However, since nobody bothers about anything in schools any longer, I bet you a shilling that these quirks will be gone within 25 years. (See you in 2031.)
Probably!
Naff attempts at branding don’t count 
Will anyone shed a tear at the passing of these distinctions? Although I know they exist, I’m unable to know which way around they go without looking it up. And out of interest, do you only ever use ‘quote’ as a verb?
The person who created the list should be spanked.
ameba?
kidnaped?
nite?
thru?
tho??
Those are lazy-ass barely literate spellings, not the official US spellings! God, I’m surprised glo, razr, ludacris, korn, staind, and lite aren’t on the list too…
Quote is the verb; quotation is the noun.
So, I rephrase my question, do you never ever use ‘quote’ as a noun? Ever? Are you sure?
You can’t run into confusion if you remember a single simple rule: If it is a measuring device it is a meter. If it is a unit of linear measurement it is a metre.
So a “kilometer” is a device for measuring kilos and an “ohmmetre” is a linear ohm (whatever they may be).
That distinction is very handy, if not indispenible, since there are measuring devices that share common or similar names with the unit of measurment. I once had to work with a sound measuring device, brand name “Decimeter”. The ability to clearly distinguish between something like a Decimeter and a Decimetre in writing is very handy.
Yes. Gosh, that list is annoying.
What about SSc? 
Paging Mr. Rimmer, Will Mr. Rimmer of the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel Red Dwarf please report to reception?
Gaol is still used in Australia in an official capacity (for example, the Centrelink forms you have to fill out to get the dole/pension/whatever ask if you’ve been imprisoned in the last fortnight, including “a gaol, watch house, or other detention facility”) but otherwise it’s generally an anachronistic term little used these days in print.
The “-tre” ending makes more sense if you’ve at least a passing knowledge of French, as English has a number of loanwords from French.
Personally, I’ve always thought “Meter” (as in “Kilometer” or “centimeter”) just looks wrong, and smacks of some American deciding he didn’t like the way a perfectly good word was spelt and changing it arbitrarily…