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...?