Back in the 1980’s, I wrote user manuals for a Canadian-based technology company. We were international; we exported our technology around the world. We used Canadian spelling when we wrote English. That is, we used “cheque,” “centre,” and “colour.” We did not use “kerb” or “tyre,” or similar.
Yet the people who complained were the Americans, who said we had spelling errors in the documentation. They wanted the whole mess rewritten in American spelling.
I’ve read written works in both American and British spelling, and understood both. Why can Americans not understand both, as the rest of us in the English-speaking world do? Americans, just understand that there are different spellings and deal!
but ‘50 shades of grey’ would not be the same if it was ‘50 shades of gray’
…admit it, you’ve all read bits.
written by an aussie and the movie which i fear is going to be horrible starring don johnson’s daughter who looks like her father in a wig. they didn’t change the spelling to ‘gray’
In the US, “grey” and “gray” are often used interchangeably. The distinction between the color and the name has been largely forgotten for many years now.
“Grey” is the British spelling, and “gray” is the American. I suspect that the reason some Americans are comfortable with both is that the word shows up a lot in Tolkien’s writings.
Personally, I think of the two as being different shades, for that reason. To me, “grey” describes things like Gandalf’s beard, or wisps of fog on a marsh, but not the sorts of gray one encounters in more pedestrian contexts.
I use grey for bluish greys and gray for reddish grays, but that’s mostly for my own amusement. I don’t expect or assume anyone else maintains such a distinction.
I love the perplexity ‘Zed’ causes. It’s not as if there’s any great consistency in the pronunciation of letter names, or any great need for them to rhyme.
I mean, sure, ‘Zee’ rhymes with B, C and P - and ‘Zed’ doesn’t, but we don’t pronounce Q as ‘kwee’, or F as ‘fee’.
This has made me think. Why “kay” instead of “key”? Why “ess” instead of “see”? Why a pirate sound instead of “ree”. Why “y” instead of “yee”?
That said, while not all letters are pronounced ending in “-ee”, no other letters end in “-ed”. “Zed” just sticks out like a sore thumb. Besides, it ruins the rhyme of the alphabet song.
I fail to see why your opinion is relevant. American English and British English are the same language. They are only separate dialects. Not that that’s really relevant.
Proper nouns are proper nouns. It’s not “Pearl harbor” but “Pearl Harbor.” That is its name, and changing a name because you think it is spelled wrong is always an insult. If you actually say it differently, you can spell it differently, by necessity. But if you say it the same way, you spell it the same way. That’s just the general etiquette.
By your logic, we can respell all those towns in England to use our spelling, like, say, dropping the H off all the "burgh"s, as our word is “burg” or even “berg.” Heck, the Labour Party is made up of entirely common nouns, so we can spell it “Labor Party.”
When you capitalize a word, that word is part of the name. Insisting that we use “Labour Party” and “Aldeburgh” while you use “Pearl Harbour” is hypocritical, whether you have a style guide implying that Americans are weird for insisting on proper spelling or not.
I don’t care whether their actual intent is to insult. When you insist on one thing for yourself but disregard our own request for the same thing, it comes off as insulting, due the inherent implication that you deserve something we don’t.
As for “zed”–the problem is not so much that it doesn’t end in “ee,” but that it’s an oddball. It’s the only letter beside H that ends in a consonant sound that the letter never makes. And at least an H is used to spell out “aitch,” and doesn’t make a song not rhyme.
I know that zed is short for “zeta,” but I do not know why it wasn’t further shortened like the other letters, nor why the vowel didn’t shift. (My guess is that “aitch” comes from “eta.”)