Canadian Spelling

As Winston Smith said with unconscious irony, the best books are those that tell you what you know already, and the same goes for opinion pieces in the Globe and Mail, such as this one by Galadriel Watson, “At the ‘center’ of a controversy: a defence of Canadian spelling”.

Like her, I’ve inwardly railed at “Health Center”and similar signs. “Centre”, apart from the fact that it’s spelled that way everywhere else in the English-speaking world, made etymological sense. Why should Noah Webster change it on a whim? Besides, the spelling is the same in French, and better suited to Canada.

The article covers other Canadian spellings which have survived the American influence, such as the “-our” words like colour, the “ll” words like counsellor and traveller, and the verb-noun distinction in practice(n)” and “practise(v) and licence(n) and license(v). The author is concerned that our schools do not always promote Canadian spelling.

[E]ducational settings must be careful – including a child-care facility being built by the school district itself. A habit set in childhood is a habit set for life. My own daughter, as she was about to graduate high school, wrote an essay using “practice” as a verb. I tried to persuade her to change it to “practise.” She declined. She said that spelling it like that would be weird.That’s the point. If becoming Americanized makes us “normal,” I’m all for being weird.

On word that didn’t survive the American influence is “aluminium”, which is, of course, the original Latin. One story has it that current spelling results from the carelessness of an early American typesetter. Fortunately, his negligence didn’t leave us with “sodum”, “potassum”, “barum”, etc.

And now for the most pernicious American influence of all — on the punctuation of quoted words. You will notice how, in the previous paragraph, for example, the quotation marks do not include the comma, for the comma is not part of the quotation. That is how the rest of the English-speaking world, and the Oxford Canadian English Dictionary, would punctuate it. It’s also how the person in the street would do it, because it’s common sense. But look at the quotation from the Globe and Mail, which, like other Canadian newspapers, continues to do it the American way. This malpractice, too, is said to have resulted from the act of an early typesetter who thought it looked neater if the comma or period were tucked inside the quotation marks. So much for tradition and meaning and common sense!

I will conclude with the last sentence from that quotation, correctly punctuated!

If becoming Americanized makes us “normal”,  I’m all for being weird.

For more articles, see Table of Contents.