Flavor vs. Flavour

An anonymous reader writes "A recent flamewar ensued on the Linux kernel mailing list, this time debating the proper spelling of 'flavor', or is it 'flavour'? Even Linux creator Linus Torvalds joined the fray with some rather humorous comments. For the most part, it sounds like spellings will stay as they are, but it makes for an entertaining read."

Comments

Re:That's no flamewar

[evilviper]

Not that it's a red-hot flameware, but you really seem to have completely missed the better ones:

Anybody who screws with that spelling is setting himself up for the red hot poker treatment...

toothpicks under the fingernails comes to mind.

your patch isn't silly, it's EVIL.

It's a light flamewar, they are just less explicit about it... (Eg. "Fucking" vs. "Having Sex")

Not quite

[freeweed]

Up here in Canada, centre is the noun, and center is the verb.

So The Medical Centre, and you center your sights on a target.

Re:Oh no!

[dJCL]

Not too bad, what was real fun was coding with my best friend, way back in grade 11 with pascal... He has an easier time working with var names that are not descriptive but just plaid different and can be logical units in your head. It was small code so we could bacially keep track of everything in our heads... but having lines of code that read:

if ( pig > cow ) then horse;

makes for fun codeing.. and a global search and replace right before handing it in makes for good marks... heh(that and the fact that we taught more of the class then the teacher, but she still did a good job with the other students, it's just that there were more of us then her)

I suspect multiple spellings of the same word would have the opposite effect, and i have had issues with it just lately while working with some toolkits that don't use standardized spellings...

I like the solution some have thou, just define the function twice with the same name! If you got the mem for that, it solves a few problems...

Anyway, enough of my ranting...

American spellings, definitions taking over?

[Vellmont]

So does anyone find that the American spellings of these words are becoming more prevalent? One example I've always found interesting is the English billion vs the American billion. The english is 10^12, where the American billion is 10^9. It gets more screwy at trillion, where an English trillion is 10^18, while an American trillion is 10^12.

The point of mentioning this is that from what I've heard the American definitions of billion, trillion, etc are becoming more popular in the UK.
Being an American I've always thought the English definitions were inconsistant, since they have a seperate name for 10^0, 10^3, 10^6, but then suddenly start only giving seperate names at 10^6 intervals.

Obviously the spelling of flavour vs flavor is fairly irrelevant, and doesn't have the same issues as the definition of billion does. But I'm still curious if spellings have that same bleed-over factor.

Webster was a tool.

[jstockdale]

Now that we have that established, let me elaborate:

Back in the day when webster was starting out, we Americans has this little disagreement with the Brittish. You might recall that some things were changed just as a nice little #$@# off to the Commonwealth. Case in point: driving on the right side of the road (not to start a flame war, but economically and logically it doesn't make sense)

Well between Webster's desire to change the language himself, and the desire to reduce the number of letters in commonly used words (letters = money for printers) Webster started changing shit just cause he could.

At the point when Webster created his dictionary, the concept that there WAS such a thing as a "correct" spelling was just beginning to take hold.

For correct reason, see quote Robin Williams Live on Broadway 2002 in reference to a parallel situation: King James breaking away from Rome and starting the Anglican church:
"Ha ha! Whose the fucking pope now!"

Gee-zous Ker-iced

[davmoo]

First we spent years of time and hundreds of man-hours debating whether it was pronounced lie-nucks, lee-nuks, or li-nuks.

Now this.

If we all spent this time coding and debugging instead of debating crap like this that simply does not matter, Linux would be the first totally error and bug free OS on the planet.

Re:U.S. spelling has the original forms

[RedWizzard]

If you 506 million is right, with 260} of them in the US, that still gives us a majority, albeit not a large one.

According to the CIA World Factbook the US has a literacy rate of 97%. There goes your majority.

Of course I doubt the literacy of the rest of the 506 million is as high as 97%.

British is better.

[rokzy]

British spelling makes use of a consistent prefix-stem-suffix system to build words.

this makes it possible to work out general meanings of words if you don't know the exact definition.

consider:

centre
centripetal
centrifuge
--common stem "centr"

theatre
theatrical
--common stem "theatr"

the American spelling may seem simple, but it is very shallow. Individual words may be spelt more like how they sound (or seem to sound), but the relationships between words are lost.

consider the US spelling of "center" with the stem "cent"; this suggests a meaning to do with the number 100.

this is probably why the US comes up with retarded stuff like phonics?

Re:U.S. spelling has the original forms

[plumby]

try to find a Brit who still says "lorry" instead of "truck" and doesn't remember WW II first hand

I say lorry, and so do most other Brits that I know.

If you check Mr. Shakespeare's manuscripts, you'll find color, not colour,

As Shakespeare supposedly spelled his own name in 27 different ways (Shakespear, shakespere etc), I don't think he's a useful guide.

and the pronounciation and spelling of alumin(i)um (Brits "aluMINIum", Yanks "ALUminum") started out the American way, until those bloody English blokes started going continental on us for a while

It actually started as Alumium, but Sir Humphrey Davy (who first named it) for some reason then changed his mind and called it aluminum. The Brits (and as far as I understand, the rest of the English speaking world outside of the US) decided to use aluminium because it fitted better with everything else that he'd named (magnesium, barium, calcium etc).

And how can you argue that British English is getting more quaint (attractively old-fashioned) and then point out that the the US actually uses the old-fashioned spelling?

Re:U.S. spelling has the original forms

[BJH]

If you actually checked your facts before spouting off, you'd know that the discoverer of aluminium named it "alumium". The IUPAC then gave it the name "aluminium" to bring it into line with other elements (you know, sodium, potassium, etc. - gee, there doesn't seem to be any others that end in -num), and the US used this spelling until 1925 when the American Chemical Society had a fit of contrariness and decided to use "aluminum" (please note that the IUPAC spelling has always been aluminium).

Oh, by the way, if you check back before Shakespeare, centre, colour, etc. were spelled the right way. It's just that at the time the USA was formed, the irregular -or forms were in vogue.

English is becoming American

[SerpentMage]

I write and present for a living. My wife for works for an international Investment bank. We DO NOT live in either the US or UK. We live in Switzerland.

What is the English used? American English. My wife even had a document pop up in her email defining what language to use and what words to use. Lo and behold what language dominated? American English, even though the company was not American or British...

The reality is that American English is winning, even among those "common wealth" countires...