D3X73R

The most obvious difference in American and British theat{er/re} is the spelling, but on top of that there are a number of meaning differences. And then the meanings interfere with the spellings again. Much fun, but this is why I can't write short blog posts. Here we go... the spelling Theater is one of those American spellings that is attributed to Noah Webster.* But like most of successful American spelling reforms, it wasn't made up by an American. It was a long-standing spelling in England, and the predominant spelling at the time when the English colonies in America were first being settled. The OED says: The earliest recorded English forms, c 1380, are theatre and teatre ; from c 1550 to 1700, or later, the prevalent spelling was theater (so in Dictionaries from Cawdrey to Kersey), but theatre in Holland, Milton, Fuller, Dryden, Addison, Pope; Bailey 1721 has both, ‘ Theatre , Theater ’: and between 1720 and 1750, theater was dropped in Britain, but has been retaine...

One of my new year's resolutions is to read all the unread newspapers in the house before buying another. It is a Very Big Task. I started before Christmas and thought I'd have it done before New Year's Day, but I still have a substantial pile. We only buy the Saturday Guardian , but it has lots of sections and I can read at most two over the weekend--then the rest pile up. So there I was reading the front section from 19 December, and I came across this (emphasis added): After at tidal wave of hype, promotion and anticipation, Star Wars: The Force Awakens looks like justifying even the most optimistic box office predictions over its first weekend on general release. I read that several times, then read it to Better Half several times. He kept insisting it was completely fine. I kept being incredulous--not so much that looks like justifying could be said in someone's English, but that I'd been here 16 years and never noticed it. Then I went to link to the article in...