During my six years in Canada, I have had the pleasure of sending many forms, documents and letters, not to mention lots of hard-earned cash, to the following address:
Consulate General of Canada
Immigration Regional Program Centre
3000 HSBC Center
Buffalo, New York
Notice anything strange there?
Canada officially uses British English spelling, which as a Brit I tend to notice only in juxtaposition with the US alternatives. In reality, American English is not only tolerated but crops up all over the place. I’ve seen a lot of strange mixtures of the two spelling systems – most Canadian research centres (it’s almost always a centre) have tumour programs, but the odd tumor program or even tumour programme might crop up.
The reason I’m writing about this now is that I’m in the middle of finali(s/z)ing a big grant application. We’re submitting it to a US government agency, who are funding fewer grants each year and are becoming less and less likely to send money out of the country. My department has a large British contingent and has always used British spelling. However I’ve managed to persuade them to use US spelling this time around.
My time in industry taught me that when your customers are largely American, using British spelling is detrimental. I think this is because Americans are generally much less accustomed to reading British spelling than Brits and Canadians are used to reading American English. Words like tumour, realise, centre, colour and especially programme tend to leap out of the page at them and remind them that this material is from a foreign company. My last employers switched to US spelling in all their materials based on this kind of customer feedback.
The same goes for grants. The last thing we want to do is constantly remind our reviewers that this research will not be taking place in the US. Of course they will already know this, but when every paragraph keeps reminding them that this is not an American application, it must affect their opinion of the grant in some way.
Using American spelling won’t give us an advantage, but using British spelling would be a definite disadvantage.
Any thoughts? I’ve cross-posted this at my other blog to see whether the comments of my predominantly US-based Blogspot readers are any different to those of the more international crowd at Nature Network, which also contains several editors and other professional writers…
Oh good grief. I have horrendous trouble trying to persuade Australians to spell correctly. The Macquarie Dictionary is as bad as Microsoft’s version of ‘British’ English that did so harm so long ago.
It’s “realize”, you dolts. Everyone knows about color/colour, licence/license (noun) and I should hope they realize that ‘programme’ is not the same thing as a ‘program’, but there is this amazing blindspot about ‘ize’ endings.
The OED puts it best :
Huh?
I did not exactly have a classical education and generally have no idea which words have Latin roots and which are Greek. Am I really supposed to treat them differently? I just use -ise uniformly when writing for a UK/Canadian audience, and -ize uniformly when writing for Americans. I had no idea that some words are genuinely different from each other. Or are you saying that even Brits should always use -ize?
_really supposed to treat them differently? _
no, you’re not. That’s the point the OED is making.
Or are you saying that even Brits should always use -ize?
if you’re forming a verb from the root of a word, yes.
(Analyse, however, comes from ‘analysis’, so the Americans are demonstrably wrong. ‘Merchandise’ v because it’s from the noun ‘merchandise’. And for completeness’ sake, ‘aluminum’ is correct but ugly. )
I apologize if this is unclear.
So, you’re sending forms to a computer program?
My take on the reali(s/z)e debate is simply that don’t like zeds. Zees even less.
I usually do use ‘ize’ because for some reason it looks quirky to me – and I promize to do it even more in future.
Has anyone else noticed that ye olde spellings ‘phantasy’ and ‘divers’ (as in ‘diverse’) are resurgent? I’m seeing them everywhere just lately.
I want to go to the clubs/smoke what you do.
Quite a few years ago, the US Nature monthly titles declared they’d go over to US spelling/usage, having been held to the parent Nature style until then. So for Nature journals, it depends on where the main editorial office is situated. Crazy, sensible or pragmatic?
The “ise” “ize” distinction, so far as I know, has its origins in UK newspaper (the former) versus magazine (the latter) use – from “way back when” (ie before internet and before I jumped the shark and became an editor). One Dr Philip Campbell, then Physical Sciences Editor at Nature, got our journal to change its style from “ise” to “ize”, on these grounds (early 1980s I think). Ever since, Nature style has been “ize” unless there is a y before the s/z, in which case it is “yse” (analyse, dialyse, catalyse etc).
Sulphur vs sulfur has been subject of many a Correspondence letter. Or oestrogen vs estrogen, anyone? (OR vs ER receptor — after a long argument once, Nature agreed to the abbreviation ER because everyone uses it, even though we use the spelling oestrogen for the full word).
The ramifications are endless. Our most recent dilemma was programme/program disk/disc but the wounds are too fresh for me to continue. Maybe on a future occasion.
I wonder to what extent searches are hampered by variations in spelling and usage? It is not only American vs English English, usage can vary between fields, eg genetics journals tend to refer to the Alzheimer gene or disease, whereas medical (and most other publications?) use the apostrophe Alzheimer’s.
Ooo. Don’t get me started on sulphur. That way, lay fosforus.
BTW, my “ise” “ize” comment was just to say how the useage came about at Nature, its orgins are as you say, Richard (somewhat more clearly than the OED!). Sorry to use such loose language! (mutters….slopes off to the epinepharine. Or should that be adrenalin? adrenaline?)
@Richard: apparently my reading comprehension is better at 7am with a cup of tea in hand than it was last night after a long day and a couple of glasses of wine. Amazing, eh? All is clear now. But seeing as whole countries are doing it wrong, the problem of what my department writes looking strange to American readers is still there.
Oh, and I was gutted when I learned that aluminum is correct. How could they have ignored all those other -iums in the periodic table?
@Bob and Brian: zs definitely look strange to me too. All jaggedy and whatnot. Also more commonly mistyped than the letter s, for me anyway.
@Matt: I’ll write those into my application as soon as I get to work. My boss will love it. In fact I think I’ll try to change the title of the grant to include divers phantasies.
@Maxine: I didn’t think anyone was still using oestrogen! Differences that change acronyms are a tricky one. I wonder if PubMed and Google are clever enough to automatically search for both versions.
Oh, and I wonder why Americans use the term adrenaline junkie, when they use epinephrine for the hormone?
If you are consistent, which one presumes you would be, the un-American spellings should not count against you, particularly since you are applying from Canada. I cannot speak to the personal biases of all grant reviewers from all US funding agencies, but I don’t think you need to lose sleep over this. A quick search of CRISP (i.e., funded PHS applications) turns up tumour, centre, visualise, programme, and so on. Poor diction and faulty grammar would be a more significant stumbling block. You may need to be careful of word choice … not sure of a science example, but on the lines of biscuit vs cookie.
In the reverse direction, you won’t see British spellings coming back on any summary statements (or you shouldn’t). NIH Scientific Review Officers monitor these to remove British spellings and other potential identifiers in written critiques so as to maintain the anonymity of reviewers (otherwise, the lone Brit or Aussie or Canadian etc. on the panel might stand out).
Thanks Michelle. It’s great to get feedback from someone experienced in the US review process! This is actually not an NIH grant, but I’m sure the policies are very similar across the US government’s jurisdiction.
Cath – my experience as a Brit getting US money is that the spelling doesn’t matter. What does matter is the scientific content and probably the reputation of the team applying.
Humphrey Davy called it aluminum by the way. Anyone going to argue for platinium?
Let’s hope you’re right about the content!
I’m going to start using the word Platinium to confuse Americans.
being a Canadian who spends my days talking to others across the globe, I always find it interesting when I go to write an email. Generally, US spellings have crept their way into my emails, mainly because I don’t want to be pinpointed as coming from a specific country.
What was HIGHLY amusing was when i was talking to a post-doc in the US with a very thick accent from his home country. When I spelled his email address back to him, I said “zed” and he corrected me several times, insisting that it was zee . I nearly peed myself laughing because, to be honest, it was one of the only letters I understood of the email address. The rest were too obscured by the accent to understand well enough!
Cath, your “O” comment made me go and check, because it was oestrogen when I subedited content, but I haven’t done that for a few years. And yes, I can exclusively reveal here, Nature does still use the O, as in this first return to the search word “estrogen” in the trusty [eh?]nature.com search engine:
Gene transcription: Two worlds merged
David M. Lonard, Bert W. O’Malley
SUMMARY: Why would two distant genes ? on separate chromosomes and from different nuclear locations ? unite in response to signals for gene expression? They might be seeds for the formation….
CONTEXT: …these two types of method to show that gene expression associated with activation of the nuclear receptor ERα (oestrogen receptor-α) depends in part on a large-scale reorganization of the genome that involves interactions both within…
Nature 452, 946 – 947 (23 Apr 2008), doi: 10.1038/452946a, News and Views
From Wikipedia – the Modern Prince of Lies –
Estrogens (U.S., otherwise oestrogens or œstrogens)
Sometimes, although very rarely, the USA gives up and agrees with the rest of the world. For a very long time the US called the element Niobium, Columbium, and persisted even after the rest of the world agreed on Niobium. Why they were so tenacious is a mystery. The history of its discovery states that it was first isolated in the UK by Charles Hatchett who named it Columbium as it was extracted fron ore sent from the colony of Massachusetts by the Governor of Connecticut. This confusion continues because there was doupt as to whether Tantalum and Columbium were the same element or not. 50 years later Niobium is isolated in Germany and named as such because no-one was aware of Hatchett’s earlier work. However, both Columbium and Niobium were used interchangeably until 1950 when IUPAC agreed on Niobium (Nb) as the official designation.
American’s continued to use Columbium for the name of the metal after the IUPAC decision, presumably because of the origin of the ore, until very recently. Indeed US government data called it Columbium(Niobium) at least until 1998. The current US official documentation now calls it Niobium(Columbium) presumably because they have now decided to follow the rest of the world and use the IUPAC designation.
It’s interesting that one of things the US sanitized Conservapedia used to pick up as an example of the bias in Wikipedia was:
‘Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. Look up “Most Favored Nation” on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling “Most Favoured Nation.” Look up “Division of labor” on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling “Division of labour,” then insists on the British spelling for “specialization” also.[9] Enter “Hapsburg” (the European ruling family) and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been “Hapsburg”. Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.’
– they have now dropped this claim.
There certainly is a certain amount of ignorance out there, as typified by this question on Yahoo Answers:
*Why do British people always spell everything incorrectly?*
I came across a list of british spellings and it seems very different than it should be…i.e., colour instead of “color”, generalise instead of generalize, prise instead of prize, etc.
Why did they start spelling everything incorrectly?
This could be ironic, but the remark about prize/prise suggests it isn’t.
Wikipedia itself is quite open to what people want to do. This from its style guide:
The English Wikipedia has no general preference for a major national variety of the language. No variety is more correct than the others. Users are asked to take into account that the differences between the varieties are superficial. Cultural clashes over spelling and grammar are avoided by using four simple guidelines. The accepted style of punctuation is covered in the punctuation section.
Consistency within articles
Each article should consistently use the same conventions of spelling and grammar. For example, center and centre are not to be used in the same article. The exceptions are:
quotations (the original variety is retained);
titles (the original spelling is used, for example United States Department of Defense and Australian Defence Force); and
explicit comparisons of varieties of English.
Strong national ties to a topic
An article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation uses the appropriate variety of English for that nation. For example:
American Civil War—(American English)
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—(British English)
European Union institutions—(British or Irish English)
Australian Defence Force—(Australian English)
Vancouver—(Canadian English)
@Kyrsten: did you manage to get the email to the right address?! At least spelling differences are easy to fix, eh?
@Maxine: despite using that spelling all through my undergrand and postgrad training, oestrogen looks really strange to me now. Foetus still looks right though. Do you get much cognitive dissonance as an editor when something just looks wrong to you, but it’s listed as being consistent with the style guide?
@Brian D: interesting stuff! My knowledge of chemical controversies stops at Alumin(i)um, thanks for the other examples!
@Brian C: Conservapedia is a hoot. I remember reading about the ban on that nasty, librul British spelling when Conservapedia launched and all the blogs were mercilessly taking the mickey.
The quote you found on Yahoo supports my theory that most Americans are less accustomed to reading foreign spellings than other native English speakers, although academics no doubt escape that generalization.
Why the difference in kids books? It is it HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the USA and HP and the Philosopher’s Stone in the UK? Philip Pullman has Northern Lights in the UK and Golden Compass in the USA.
I could go on and I probaly will but later.
Now that is a good question. I can imagine that the US publisher shied away from the word Philosopher in the belief that kids might think the book was about philosophy and give it a miss. The word sorcerer is definitely more descriptive of the content of the book, which would be especially important when branding the first book in a series.
I didn’t actually know that the Pullman book has different titles in different places. I haven’t read that series (yet) so I can’t comment on the descriptiveness of either title. I have no idea why “Northern Lights” would be considered unsuitable over here!
Yes, surprisingly I did get it to the right address – and I even got a response! (meaning i know it didn’t get firmly lodged in the spam folder immediately)