Today is one of the rare days when I can’t even make a tenuous connection to the airline direct channel with a post, but it is Christmas Eve so silly season reporting probably means I can get away with it.
Since moving to live in the United States in August this year I’ve changed my spelling to American English (apart from enquiry and inquiry – just can’t bring myself to be that American yet), and when I read Tnooz I see there are some writers using the Queen’s English and others using the US version.
So the recently released NGram tool from Google labs proved useful for an interesting little exercise. Note that this tool has its critics, but it still proved useful for the purpose I am using it for today.
From the universe of millions of old books scanned by Google, the best comparison above is to look at the blue and red line. It shows the relative rise of American spelling of the word traveled versus the relative decline of the same word being spelt with a double ‘l’
So it looks like US spelling is winning, but this still won’t stop me reverting to the Queen’s English when I move back to Australia sometime in the coming years.
Merry Christmas, and thanks for your continued support – I am picking up new subscribers/readers every week, so this definitely helps keep me motivated to continue getting up early most mornings before work to try and post something relevant.
December 25, 2010 at 10:23 am
Martin: Merry Christmas. Your writings, both here and on Tnooz, are awesome. About all this Australia, UK, American stuff, I guess, as the American poet Robert Frost might have misspelled it, you are taking a “road less travelled by.”:)
December 25, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Dennis, if only my posts could live up to this quote from Robert Frost. “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”