This is my Canada Day confession: I lost my “us“ about a decade ago, along with my “res“ and my “gues.” I stubbornly held onto them throughout graduate school in the United states, and I even have a footnote in my dissertation about my preference for “theatre“ rather than “theater.“ My dissertation supervisor rolled his eyes at me in a rare meeting (apart from my defence – see what I did there? – I believe we met a total of five times in five years); “This is American cultural history, Matt,” he informed me, “We use American spelling.“
I stood my ground. After all, I had read a fair number of monographs by American historians of, say France who invariably preferred American spellings over the French. One, I pointed out, even altered the spellings in quotes of British sources – no self-respecting Briton, for example, would have described Berlin in 1924 as a “center of modernist experimentation,” I checked; he didn’t.
As a Canadian historian (of American culture), I had as much right to write about the “dialogue between American composers and their French colleagues.“ And the riot at the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps that so inspired George Antheil had occurred at the Theatre de Champs Elysees, which had inspired “some of the most daring and experimental works in his catalogue.“
American spellings be damned; I was not going to surrender my cultural distinctiveness to the American cultural hegemony!
But I did.
Being a graduate student was one thing; being a working academic was another. I remember when the editors of Modernism/Modernity blandly informed me that they were changing all my Canadian spellings in a book review. Most publishers don’t even offer that courtesy. They just do it.
Over time, I encountered bafflement from my American students, if not outright hostility, at my culturally distinctive orthography. “That’s not how we learned it in school,” they said. “Say aboot again!” After a while, I adopted American spellings for my syllabi, assignment prompts, PowerPoint slides and internal school communications.
I am sure that my colleagues and students were relieved to be spared reading foreign spellings, and it really did make my life a little easier. It was nice not to have to explain myself all the time. I was still a Canadian, a foreigner in a land becoming hostile to foreigners an “undercover Canadian,” as it were. But I fit in – at least orthographically.
And it made me queasy. I felt as if I had sacrificed a part of myself, and every time that I Wrote “color“ or “analog,” I had the sense that I had committed a transgression, as if I had willingly eaten a ham sandwich or sung a Christmas carol. I had, in fact, done those things in my youth, and the sickening memory of how it felt to do things just to “fit in” came rushing back every time.
I was conforming just to fit in.
I also became an agent of conformity to the American hegemony when I was an editor. When I launched the Typescript in 2019, I created a style guide that privileged American spellings. My reasoning was that the vast majority of our readers and contributors would be American (an assumption that did not turn out to be the case) and that it just made sense to standardize on the majority.
Looking back six years, I I was can see that I was just surrendering to the American hegemony.
That became clear, in fact, when my Associate Editor Matthew Barlow – like me a Canadian expat, but with a greater resistance to conformity – flatly refused to use American spellings. Moreover, a significant number of submissions came from Canadian poets and writers (perhaps an inevitable hazard, given that the whole editorial team were Canadian expats). I found that I was making endless exceptions to the rules that I imagined would make my editing life easier.
It also bothered me, as Barlow noted, that I had become a cop enforcing the practices of the colonial oppressor. I was a comprador – or worse – and I didn’t like how that felt. I threw out the style guide and decided that, although I might continue to use American spellings for the sake of my own convenience – after all, when in Rome – I would not enforce it on anyone else.
Americans are often amused by Canadian spellings. “It’s catalog, not catalogew, you silly Canadian!” The idea that the two syllables in the word “honor,” or, as we write, “honour,” are different vowel sounds (they are) seems absurd to them. And don’t get them started with “theatre” (which required a footnote in my dissertation), “kilometre,” and “centre.” The idea that “re“ might produce an “er” sound often seems beyond their ken. We seem like such silly colonials!
Yet, at the same time, Americans do absurd linguistic things of their own, like forgetting that there is an “h“ at the start of the word “herb,“ I remember the first time that an American asked me if wanted “black or herbal“ at a New York cafe when I ordered tea. I stared into space for a few moments as I tried to parse what she said. I do not believe that I had ever heard it put quite that way.
The fact is that the spellings that so many Americans find so amusing and quaint today have, in fact, existed in US culture. There is a “Centre Street” in lower Manhattan, once the address of the NYPD, that most American of law enforcement agencies. At weddings, Americans still referred to the bride’s chief assistant as a Maid of Honour as late as the 1940s, and Americans still had neighbours in 1893, when George Clancy died. The New York Times reported that his “many neighbours [italics mine]” attended his funeral in Brooklyn.
Language evolves; we no longer call the place where criminals are detained a “gaol” (nor less a “hoosegow”) or an unmarried woman a “maid,” for example. And the same language in different cultural and social contexts will, inevitably, evolve differently. That concept should be understandable to anyone familiar with Charles Darwin’s finches.
It turns out that the democratic pressures in the United States tended to favor a gradual simplification of English spelling. So, spelling has become far more phonetic, especially as the subtle difference of pronunciation – say, between the “o” and the “ou” in “colour” – dissolved in the increasingly standardized (and, frankly homogenized) received American accent. After all, why spell the same sound two different ways?
One of my friends recently. complained about the bizarre and non-standard features of English spelling, A guy on a horse in a suit of armour (see what I did there?) is a knight, pronounced “night…” which is pronounced “nite.” That is because every single consonant, from the initial “k” to the glottal “ght” was actually pronounced when guys actually were riding around on horses and carrying pointed sticks.
Under the pressures of history – social change, immigration, the industrial revolution, democratization, techno logical innovations, imperialism, and everything else – pronunciation changed. But they did not always change the same way, in the same places. That’s why voice-to-text software balks at Scottish English, A Londoner might say “Siri, find me a parking place,” but a Scot would say, “Sirrrri, feynd me a payrrkin’ pless.” Poor Siri.
Yet, a Scot and a Londoner would read the same words, in the standardized orthography of English in the same characters, regardless of what they heard in their interior voices, or what came out of their mouths, So, it made sense to retain the standard orthography, as absurd as it sometimes is, to preserve some inter-intelligibility in written communication. And the British Empire, now the Commonwealth of Nations, was entirely dependent on written communication. So people in Cape Town, Auckland , and Cardiff all played rugby, even if they called the sport “rigby, “roogbeh,” or just “rugby. “
Not so the United States. And, throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, the United States was sufficiently isolated from the rest of the English speaking World that it had no pressing need to adopt Commonwealth standard spellings and, conversely, a compelling desire to democratize and simplify orthography for the masses. (Significantly, the upper classes tended to retain British and Commonwealth orthography and practices much longer than the hoi polloi as a badge of superiority.)
“Dialog” lost its “ue,” color lost a “u,” and no one cared enough about the “re” in kilometre because we use miles here! American spelling became a badge of American can-do practicality and a way for Americans to show their commitment to democratic values, their independence, and their distinctiveness (if not their superiority – something that Americans seem to be obsessed about) to those silly Brits and their Commonwealth flunkies.
To write “color,” “honor,” “theater,” and “dialog,” is to say, “the Yanks are here, motherf***er!” And that is why, if you live among Americans, as I do, there is always so much pressure to conform. It is a way for a foreigner like me to acknowledge American supremacy in everything and to prove that we are not British losers. A drinking buddy once put it in almost exactly those words in a Brooklyn pub around 2006. Should I mention that he was wearing a Manchester United jersey at the time?
So, my adoption of American spellings and orthography, whatever I might have told myself, and however convenient, was a surrender, a kowtow, a knuckling-under to the dominant American belief in American superiority. Whatever Americans this about their leaders and government, I have found that almost all of them (with some exceptions) really do believe that “American” is simply a synonym for “better.” After living in their country for two decades, I find that I do not, in fact cannot, agree.
It is not something that I can take easily at a time when this deeply ingrained sense of American superiority – call it Manifest Destiny or exceptionalism, if you will – is the motive force behind a politics meant to destroy my home country, spelling and all.
Barlow was right; color, honor dialog, analog, theater, and all the rest are simply white flags of surrender. And today, after the tariffs, the 51st state bullshit, and just the endless litany of disrespect, the time has come to reject America and its simplistic spelling, where they say “zee” rather than “zed, so the alphabet song rhymes (and they won’t forget the letters).
I will be a proud Canadian in every word that I write from now on, I will not be afraid: These colours don’t run.