US spellings

[desperance]

My remarkably good friend moshui finds himself quandarised caught on the horns of a quandary, and you know how uncomfortable that can be.

His copy-editor has recast his new fantasy novel in American spelling; which is not unreasonable on the face of it, its having an American publisher and hence inevitably a largely American audience. But Dan is a Brit to his boots, and his English is exceedingly British, and he's just not comfortable with this strange accent it's been pressed into.

But of course, being brighter than me, his first concern is sales. If he asked for the spellings to revert to English English, will potential readers be put off? He asks, and I don't know the answer; so I thought I'd ask you on his behalf. Go on over here and give him the benefit of your wisdom, for I have none.

(NB - it's a fantasy novel in a secondary world, sorta Chinese but not; no variety of English would be anybody's mother tongue, if that makes a difference...)

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

It would be utterly invisible to me, but I would never argue with an editor.

[moshui.livejournal.com]

...about this, or about anything...?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I should have qualified that--the heat and smog make my brain worse than useless.

There are other issues which might cause me to attempt negotiation, but British/American spelling would not be one. As a reader, I am seldom aware which one I'm in (I read as much UK published work as I do American), as long as it's consistent.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Interesting, isn't it, how blind you can become to a spelling you would never use yourself? While you still notice all the actual misprints? I think it's like talking with someone from Elsewhere: sooner or later you stop hearing the accent, and just hear the voice...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

It's true. Inconsistencies poink at me. Not just misprints, but when Americans use 'grey' it tweaks my eye. All the talk about "There's a qualitative difference between gray and grey" isn't convincing.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee. Do they say that? Not even I would have tried to get away with that...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Are you kidding? There have been hot debates about that! My theory (which no one ascribes to) is that Americans took in 'grey' reading Tolkien, and even if they totally rejected everything else about the reading experience of LOTR, all that elven grey came to mean something down, down in the hindbrain where fantasy works. Heck, I used it myself for years and years, until I got swatted for a British spelling in my text, by my very first copyeditor, and only then did I become conscious of it.

If I want to qualify my grays, I employ adjectives, but other writers continue to insist on using 'grey' and 'gray' in the same text, and expect readers to pick up the difference in hues.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Truly, I had no idea. My dictionary makes no attempt to distinguish, except to assert that gray is generally North American in usage; over here we just use grey unworriedly. Certainly it would never have occurred to me that I was meant to intuit a difference in shade between them. Ah, how many subtleties have I missed over the years, for lack of this delicacy in language...?

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Among Pratchett readers, it's a source of constant irritation to American fans that the editors think we're too stupid to figure out the British words.

We hate it. We wish they'd leave it alone.

[valydiarosada.livejournal.com]

I have come across a number of Americans who only bought British editions of the Harry Potter books, because they hated the changes made in the US editions so much. But of course, in the case of the HP books, much more than just the spelling was altered.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the British HP books, but the same reasoning probably applies. I'm sure I'd like the British versions better.

But then, now that I think about it, I'm a BritLit specialist, so I may be even more biased than the average Discworld fan.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think the average Discworld fan is still a Brit, and so inherently biased the right way. American Discworld fans, I cannot speak for (but have they Americanised it to the point of calling it Diskworld?)

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Ah, that is true.

I have occasionally seen it misspelled "Diskworld", but not often.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Really? I know nothing of this (I have sort of determinedly not followed all the HP squabbling). What more did they change, apart from spellings and the odd title?

[valydiarosada.livejournal.com]

I am, of course, pontificating based on what others have told me rather than as a result of detailed of the various editions. :)

However I have been told that words have been changed where UK usage does not tie in with US, e.g. "fringe" has been altered to "bangs".

Also I understand that British expressions (can't give an example offhand, sorry!) have been replaced by American expressions, which, I have been told, may change the meaning, or at least the emphasis.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

As I recall, "spellotape" was one of the casualties.

[the-acrobat.livejournal.com]

I'm a Canadian. We are taught British spellings in school, and generally use them. We also find ourselves reading American editions of UK-published books as often as we find ourselves reading the original editions; we're part of their market. Personally I find it irritating to buy an edition of a British-written book with American spellings. It feels like they're correcting something that's right.

[woodrunner.livejournal.com]

I'm also Canadian and I agree with you.

It would be nice to see versions of Canadian English...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

What's specific, then, about Canadian English?

[cristalia.livejournal.com]

The Wiki article on this is actually rather good (she says, having gone looking for a good source to explain it). They're citing all the right people.

(Your tipoff for when someone talking about Canadian English is Doin It Rite is when they cite Jack Chambers.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Thank you! *is better informed*

[woodrunner.livejournal.com]

It's a blend of British and US English. I've had arguments with both native British and native US gentlemen over proper spelling, both of them telling me that my spelling was wrong.

For example, we use "colour", "favour", and so on. But we'll also use "realize", "notarize".

Wouldn't it be a perfect solution to just use Canadian English? There's a little bit of both... ;)

[moshui.livejournal.com]

Hee. You'd need a special note on the copyright page, "This book printed in Canadian throughout." And you'd still get outraged letters from both sides of the Atlantic.

[triciasullivan.livejournal.com]

I've had kind of the opposite happen for me, where a British house changes things like 'color' to 'colour' and yet keeps the American phrasing and references and overall style. I personally can't be bothered to argue about stuff like that, even though when I look at the writing as a transplanted American, I find it weird.

I can remember reading Tolkien, CS Lewis and Richard Adams as a child and the American houses didn't alter British spellings in those books, as far as I can recall. I used to think 'grey' was the right spelling because Tolkien used the word so much!

On the other hand, if it's a fantasy world anyway, as revolting as the changes might seem to you, I wonder how much it really matters to the reader--don't you just want the reader to be comfortable? I'm sure that's all the publisher wants.

Here via desperance, btw, because I happened to read his post before I got to yours. Good luck!

[moshui.livejournal.com]

"Grey" is the right spelling, silly person...

But yes, of course I want the reader to be comfortable. I'm even prepared to allow - reluctantly - that it might be more important than the comfort of the writer; once the book's published, readers will have a far closer relationship with the text than I do.

I just want to make sure that its hair is parted on the right side, before I push it out of the door. And it's likely that I use a lot of British idioms that I'm personally blind to, which might look decidedly odd - to the alert reader - in US spellings. I honestly don't know which is better, which is why I thought I'd take soundings.

[triciasullivan.livejournal.com]

Sorry Chaz how did I manage to do that? *scurries off to post reply on correct blog*

[desperance.livejournal.com]

No probs, Tricia - it's an interesting point in both threads. *g*

[moshui.livejournal.com]

Also sorry, Chaz, I seem to be equally engaged in the wrong thread here... *scuttles off after triciasullivan*

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

I was in a largely American writing group and put up a story that was just about as English as you can get - set on a combination Solsbury Hill/Yatton - and there was outrage I used English usages. I suggest being pragmatic and going with what the local experts suggest for a foreign language edition.

Daiper for nappy. I ask you.

[triciasullivan.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear. I can still remember how, a teenager trying to make sense of song lyrics, I had SO MUCH CONFUSION over the phrase 'nappy suffering' in a 1970s Jethro Tull song. If only Americans were exposed more gradually to these things...

[moshui.livejournal.com]

As it happens, I did refer to "a baby in napkins" - and did carefully spell out "napkins", not to confuse anybody with nappies - and I have yet to see what the copy editor has done with it, but I am anticipating something dreadful. If they've changed it to diapers, there will be hell to pay.

[valydiarosada.livejournal.com]

My mother (who is now in her eighties) always used the word "napkin" to mean what everyone else refers to as a "nappy", and my American sister-in-law calls a "diaper".

Going back to an earlier thread in this debate, I happily accept US vocabulary used by American writers and if I'm reading a US edition, I happily accept US spellings. However if a writer I know to be British uses an Americanism, especially in a British edition (and the late, great Bob Shaw often used the word "sidewalk" instead of the more usual "pavement"), it always hits me between the eyes.

[triciasullivan.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear...this is fraught, isn't it? I mean, 'a baby in napkins' is going to be even worse, because 'napkins' are strictly for wiping one's mouth, in the US.

Remind me to keep well clear of it all when the copy edit comes back...

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Hell, it was our language first. If they make any more fuss, we should ask for it back.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

Since this thread is now long and distributed enough to need tangents, I'll throw in the computing equivalent.

Writing software in Britain for a company which only pretended to be American for tax and regulatory purposes I naturally used British spellings (24 bit colour etc.), even though all the customers were American computer making companies. Some of my colleagues backed down and changed to American spellings for DEC and SGI, but I managed to persuade HP that they should take advantage of the Unix Native Language Support feature to supply the American spellings in a separate file, which users could select if needed. I just got the impression that the Americans inventing support for foreign languages didn't originally have their own in mind as a target market.

Maybe it's time for a War of Independence from American imperialism - let's throw all the Diet Coke into Boston (Lincs) harbour! If it has one.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yay you; I thought that software-wise all the English had capitulated long ago. Hell, I did myself learn to type "disk" and "program", tho' I don't think I ever had to go further.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

It's hard to avoid "program" in Pascal, since it's a keyword of the language, though since the inventor is Swiss we're probably lucky to have it in American rather than Romansh.

Sadly my days of fighting for the colours are long over. Since being taken over by a genuinely American company the system changed to me still writing in English, but having a (British or Indian) test department report each example as a "bug". How are the mighty fallen.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

since the inventor is Swiss we're probably lucky to have it in American rather than Romansh

Brrr. I once spent some time with a lovely Swiss German guy, back when I still spoke regular German. He spoke Schweizerdeutsch. We were ... not quite intelligible to each other. He tried to give me lessons, but - eww, the Swiss are weird. Even in the context of the weirdness of other people, the Swiss are weird.

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

We are just nine days short of the fortieth anniversary of me taking up employment as a computer programmer. In those days ICT (a British company) wrote 'programme' and IBM (a US company) wrote 'program'. It didn't last. I actually found it useful to be able to distinguish in writing between a set of instructions for a computer, and something on the radio or television. Spelling what I produce 'program' causes me no pain but I still dislike the US spellings of color, plow, etc.

[moshui.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, I had entirely forgotten about "plow" - until I discovered it in my own manuscript yesterday. It was one of my triggers; I can cope with "realize" and even "color" far more easily than this.

[devonellington.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

No, potential readers will not be put off.

I choose to use British spellings in certain places in my work. In fact, it's in my contract that certain words will be spelled that way.

I've never had a problem with it. I remind the editor and copyeditor when we begin work that it's in the contract.

[maeve-the-red.livejournal.com]

Chiming in late due to being away all week...

I'm too new to all this to offer much of use, though Jon Courtney Grimwood (who has both US and UK publishers) did tell me that he 'translates' his novels from English English to US English for our American cousins. Liz Williams's English English seems to be seen as a plus point in her Inspector Chen books (published in the US by Nightshade).

For myself, almost all my short story sales have been the the US, so I got into the habit of 'Americaning' everything I wrote (well, stranding it somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, anyway). Then I got a book deal with a UK publisher, and one of the first things my editor politely requested I do was cut the Americanisms. It felt like coming home.

Having said that, when and if I get a US publisher, if they ask me to, I'll be shedding 'U's, transmuting my 'S's to 'Z's and rediscovering my inner elevator. I'd just rather they didn't ask.