It turns out that composing a post in your head is not the same as publishing it ...
As people more famous than me have observed the English speaking countries are divided by a common language. It's a division at the margins, where the homonym (porn/pawn), the double entendre (you know!), and the slightly-out-of-context word provide mostly amusement, occasionally confusion, and twice a decade frustration and insults ... Swearing always gets your point across. I will not relate these stories here and now, but if you go for a run with me or buy me a drink I'll be happy to share.
I grew up, it seems, in one of the last cohorts of children to learn to spell properly (that's at least partly a joke), so I was well trained in the mostly British spelling used in New Zealand English. By the time I got to graduate school in America computerized spell checking meant that the transition was quite seamless. My assimilation to American spelling was assisted by watching other international students (only a couple, mind you) who seemed determined to inflict their British spelling on Americans because the British spelling was "correct." The insecurity of intelligent people refusing to use imperial measures and American spelling is not endearing.
Spell checkers catch your mistakes, but are not sensitive to context. Easily the worst copy-editing I've done was writing a paper in American English with quotes from both American and New Zealand sources, and then having to transform my own words back to Australian English while retaining the original spelling in the quotes. This was a paper that used the word "labor" and "labour" a lot, along with variations on organize.
S[t]even years of graduate school switched my natural default spelling to American English, only to see me returning to New Zealand to teach both American and New Zealand history. In both classes, but especially in the American history class, I say that the students can use either language for essays but they must be consistent. This is not a consistency I impose on myself in relatively informal writing where I write both "defence" and "defense" or "organize" and "organise" in the same paragraph, and don't care. It's just not worth the time to check it for informal writing.
I realized my default was American English a couple of months ago, when after 3 weeks in America I was grading/marking papers for my New Zealand history class as I flew home. Nearly finished the marking I realized that in 2 hours of grading I'd been "correcting" all the students' consistent New Zealand English for American spelling. Because one is correct, right? Before handing them back I disclaimed the need for students to care about that part of their marks.
As well as mixing the spelling on a regular basis I have found that 8 years between countries—including half the last year in each—has seriously reduced my perception of distinct native accents. I'll hear American accents in New Zealand, or New Zealand accents in America and it will take me quite some time to realize those people are foreign! I can still sort of hear the distinctive British and Australian accents, but even there my ear for it is fading.
The mystery of it is that others can't understand me and think I spell funny.
Posted by eroberts at July 2, 2008 8:49 AM