"Cantr"

[Stan]

"The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially standardised on aluminium in 1990, though this has done nothing, of course, to change the way people in the US spell it for day to day purposes."

Interesting...I learned 2 things. First about Aluminium and secondly that people actually spell standardized as standardised, too.

About being wrong, I guess, but I wasn't really advocating one or the other, I was simply stating that people in the US say aluminum. According to your quote, I'm actually right.

[Phalynx]

Of course american english spellings are slowly edging out true English, not primarily because of US economic dominance, or their great literary cannon but courtesy of the accursed animated paper clip and spell checker in Microsoft Word....

[Cookie]

Bollocks

[Stan]

I hate that paper clip.

[CrashBlizz]

I prefer the robot one.

[Heiner]

I simply don't use Microsoft products...

[Joshuamonkey]

I have to use Microsoft word a lot for school, and spell check does come in handy some times, I don't use any animated helpers though, I wonder if they have any knew ones?

[formerly known as hf]

Microsoft have recently changed the spellchecker to mark some americanised spellings as incorrect in British-released versions.

Saying that, all international version stick with the Americanised spellings. Amercanised spellings are quickly becommming the internatioanlly recognised form of spelling, partly due to Microsoft, but not fully.

Many international publications, especially academic ones, now use Americanised spelling formats.

This is not so bad, as, by and large, Americanisation is not that widespread, few things are actually spelt any differently.
Except for the 'ised / 'ized and 'isation / 'ization, which, as I have to read a lot of academic literature, comes up a lot for me. I can't quite pinpoint why, but it really really annoys me. Especially if I see a British academic being forced to have their work edited to use bloddy z's

And it zed, not zee.

[west]

And what do you know about it, HF?

I tend to use "ised" instead of "ized" myself, personally, but I despise Americans who use "our" instead of "or" in color, armor, etc. They just seem pretentious. I don't mind it if Brits or other people who learned it that way do it, but for people for whom American is their first language it just comes off as annoying. I don't care if it "looks cooler".

-Westerly "grumpy about grammar, too!" McGee

[sanchez]

I tend to use "ised" instead of "ized" myself, personally, but I despise Americans who use "our" instead of "or" in color, armor, etc. They just seem pretentious. I don't mind it if Brits or other people who learned it that way do it, but for people for whom American is their first language it just comes off as annoying. I don't care if it "looks cooler".

-Westerly "grumpy about grammar, too!" McGee

I'm an American who learned to read and write in London. I still mix up standards. Which one is pretentious?

[west]

Neither. You're a special case. I'm talking about those people (usually about sixteen years old, but I still run into older versions) who are American, never so much as been somewhere where British English is spoken, but use the British spellings because they "look cooler".

[wichita]

Get a sense of humour, west. :p

--pretentious American xenophile logging off

[Lyd]

"Cantar" in spanish means "To sing".

I think of the Synagogue singers in Judaism when I say Cantr: Cantor.

[Dudel]

Kan-Ter is how Dudel says it. He also adds random concanents

I.E.
Blojt= B-jort... where did the r sound come from?

[Joshuamonkey]

I tend to use "ised" instead of "ized" myself, personally, but I despise Americans who use "our" instead of "or" in color, armor, etc. They just seem pretentious. I don't mind it if Brits or other people who learned it that way do it, but for people for whom American is their first language it just comes off as annoying. I don't care if it "looks cooler".

American is my first language, but with some words I'm used to the "our" and then "or" seems weird to me. It just depends on how I learned the word I guess, especially armour. Generally I use the "or" though.
And because of Cantr I'm more used to "aluminium."

What annoys me is how American grammar puts the punctuation mark before the quotation mark! I don't want to be the correct way unless the punctuation mark is in the quotation mark. Sometimes it could be misleading otherwise.
Getting a bit off topic..