Colour,
favourite... those our words are interesting, Mum/Mom too. I like how
they have to know where a word originated from thats very
clever.
Funnily enough, a lot of so-called US spellings are actually derived
from older British spellings. In the 17th and 18th centuries there was
confusion over how to relate -or and -our spellings to the origins of
words. The lingo boffins wanted -or for words of Latin origin, -our for
words from the French.
By the 18th century the trend was all -or, and the US stuck with
that, in line with increasingly common practice in Britain at the time.
So really, a lot of "US spellings" are actually just original British
ones. Kind of buggers up our superior and prejudicial attitudes a bit,
doesnt it!
In Britain, meanwhile, the goodly Dr Johnson chucked a spanner in
the works by having some -or and some -our spellings (and often his own
letters contained spellings different from those in his dictionary!).
In the end, though, the ones Dr J. gave an -our are pretty much the ones we use it for now.
You dont have to go too far back, though, to find one of the
English-language gurus of all time, Fowler, who was very old-school
British, thinking that we should standardise on -or! His publishers
apparently werent having it, and in his best-known book (Modern
English Usage, 1928) he appears uncomfortable with -our, but stops
short of recommending a change to -or.
The -or ending has a number of things going for it, not least that
it ties in with common derivative spellings that revert to -or- anyway.
For example:
vigour vigorous
labour laborious
humour humorous
I have several style guides that have no problem with -or per
se, or even actively advocate its uptake. For example, the
Cambridge Guide to English Usage (written by Pam Peters,
Associate Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie, and published in
Australia in 2004) highly favours -or.
Well, you asked ... sort of ...
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Topic: Chaser Annual launch and appearances (Read 22853 times)