Can you spell it?

I know that I keep coming back to the subject of the English language and the differences between British English and American English, but for me, it's a continuing voyage of discovery. I first encountered this newest phenomenon when I started passing my CV (in America, we call it a Resume`). Not only do we have different words for most everything, but it seems that we also spell many of our words differently! Basically, it's a case of "same word, different spelling." The most obvious examples are the different spellings for words such as color and colour. The British custom is to add a u in many of the words we end with the combination of simply or. Conversely, words that we end in er are spelled with the reverse combination re. Examples of this are found in words such as metre and centre. But, just like many other so-called rules in the English language, the rules are quite flexible and are applied in an arbitrary way.

By and large, the differences are significant enough that most word-processing applications, even those on websites like this one, require the user to choose between the spelling preferences of American or British English. A consequence of this is that, depending upon where my material is going to be read, my spelling preferences should be set for that. But, when I can't change those preferences easily, I then have to go back and either change the spelling of all the words that appear with red lines under them, or pointedly ignore all the misspelled words. However, that entails the risk that I might have legitimately misspelled a word by both definitions. So, now I have become even more aware of my spelling than I used to be, and this is saying something because I have always been very conscientious about my spelling!

On occasion, I come across a word that is not only spelled slightly differently, but is also pronounced slightly differently on either side of "the Pond". Aluminum is such a word. As you can see, I spelled that in the American fashion. Here in the UK, it's spelled Aluminium. Did you catch the difference? Looking at it on paper, most readers will miss the difference in spelling. The difference is the addition of the letter "i" to give it an "ium" ending. There is a fascinating story behind this . . . or at least it's fascinating to me. It seems that back in the day when chemistry was the fashionable science and everyone was in a race to discover a new element, one of the leaders of the pack was a certain Humphry Davy. Sir Humphry called this new element of his Aluminum. But his peers insisted that the spelling should be Aluminium to be consistent with the names of many other elements, such as Helium, Potassium and Sodium. This, of course, ignores all the elements that are spelled with the "um" ending, such as Platinum, Molybdenum and Lanthanum.

Over the years, the British have insisted that the word be spelled Aluminium and Americans, following the tradition of the discoverer of an element having the privilege of naming, and consequentially determining the spelling of that name, called the metal, Aluminum. As it is today, Americans and Canadians spell the word aluminum and the British and Australians spell it aluminium. There is great fun to be had in discussing the merits of both spellings!

In addition to the different spellings comes different pronunciations. Americans pronounce the word as "al-LOO-min-noom." Here in the UK, they pronounce it "Al-loo-Min-NEE-oom." This is one of those key words that can tell you to which major English dialect the speaker subscribes: the Queen's English or American English. As an aside here, another key word that Americans use to discern the dialect is the word Tomato. Americans pronounce it toe-May-toe and the British pronounce it toe-MAH-toe.

And so continues the fascinating journey . . .