As I have grown older and since the advent of mass produced and affordable personal computers and eBook readers, I have become more and more frustrated with the Americanisation of the English language.
The American dictionary is always the default dictionary in operating systems, web browsers and text & number based programs. Without going into a separate rant for which there is a separate forum, it is becoming particularly bad in journalism and even British authored and published books. In particular the use of ize instead of ise (standardise vs standardize), or the dropping of the letter u (labour vs labor) and the swapping around of the letter r at the end of a word (centre vs center).
I spent many a sad hour labouriously copying out 1 to 4 pages of my spelling book during my immediate school years as a way to work off my many “Black Marks” but that still did not make me a great speller, only a good speller who knew when a word was misspelt.
In Firefox I have set my language settings but even then I am forever ‘training’ the browser:
English (NZ)
English (UK)
Maori (mi)
English (AU)
English (US)
In macOS I have only ticked British & Australian English NOT American and yet I still find Americanization’s versus Americanisation’s.
Learning the correct way to spell is not helped by advertisers who are huge culprits in bastardising the English language; lite vs light, nite vs night.
Following on from this is the misuse and mispronunciation in the spoken English; eg, brought & bought, something & somethink or off-en vs off-ten.
Now I realise that the English language is a polyglot of a multitude of languages and because of the poly-ethnic movements of populations it has adopted many words and I really would not like to see us going the way of the French when it comes to language purity but if we are going to adopt a word lets keep it in its original form.
Then we have the Spell Checker programs themselves who have now made at least two generations of bad spellers and bad grammarians. One of my pet peeves is youre instead of you're or even bear vs beer I spotted in one sentence concerning drinking and I see these inaccuracies most frequently in eBooks, which is where I am seeing this bastardisation of the English language beginning to occur the most. The English language is complicated enough without AI spell checkers making it worse.
Ok end of rant 🎓😀