Re: "y" and "r"

YHL wrote:
>On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > We-ell, the English I've learnt in school is basically RP, while most
> > English I hear in my spare time (eg on movies, lyrics etc) is American.
>The
> > result, of course, is that the English I speak is an ungodly mix of RP
>and
> > American Standard, with some random dialectal features splashed here and
> > there.
> >
> > As you may've noticed, my spelling is also something of a mix. I write
> > "colour" and "metre", but "realize" ...
>
><laugh>  I went through a similar phase in spelling!...driving many of my
>email and snail penpals nuts in the process.  But "grey" has always
>looked nicer to me than "gray," for God knows what reason; and similarly
>on many of the words where Brit and American English differ in spelling,
>I have a preference, but it isn't exactly consistent.
>
>YHL
"Gray" is ugly! Death to "gray"! Long live "grey"! :-)

Hehe, I'm with you on that point ... well, for the most part I keep to
British spellings when the American English spelling differs, but there's a
few exceptions like "realize", or indeed all words with "-ize" or
"-ization". On those I can justify it as they're clearly pronounced with /z/
in all varieties of English I've heard, but there's some less logical
exceptions like "defense". Just looks cuter than "defence". To encourage the
irregularities, no English teacher I've ever had has ever complained about
the inconsistencies.

                                                          Andreas
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