English’s Americanization Finds No Favour With Some Britons

To Britons already feeling besieged by the Yank spellcheck on their computers, government guidelines to Americanize the spelling of some scientific words in schools are making them see the colour red.

After all, sulfur and fetus aren’t part of the queen’s English they learnt.

“As if Microsoft, the Internet, Disney, rap, McDonald’s and chads were not enough to contend with, we now find an American fifth column in our own midst,” huffed the Independent newspaper in an editorial last week. “Are we really going to take lessons in language from the land whose president came up with, ‘It depends what the meaning of “is” is.’?”

The Times of London has been more tolerant of the spelling reforms outlined by the government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in February but only widely reported last week after some teachers and parents complained to the media.

“The uncompromising tyranny of British English spelling possesses no divine right,” the Times asserted.

“Linguistic chauvinists who obstinately uphold its correctitude against all reformers,” the paper added, “will ultimately play into the hands of the revolutionists, who would cast it off altogether and substitute the worse tyranny of a phonetic system.”

Whoever these subversives are, the paper did not say. But the Times did warn that they would cut off latter-day spellers from English ancestors such as Chaucer and Shakespeare. “And whose pronunciation would phonetic spelling reproduce, pray?”

Linguistic chauvinists, meanwhile, might see the Times as a dubious spelling authority, owned as it is by Rupert Murdoch, an Australian with a U.S. passport. (That’s two countries with a checkered orthographic record: The Australian Labor Party spells its name the American way.)

While not a party to the spelling hysteria, linguist John Wells of University College London has some sympathy for British traditionalists.

“Spelling is an index of literacy. Anyone literate has made an intellectual investment in the system as it is,” Wells said.

Changing sulphur to sulfur and foetus to fetus, as outlined by the reforms, is a tough adjustment. “It looks like a spelling mistake, almost like ‘fotograph,’ ” he said. “People who can’t spell do that.”

The scientific organizations that first proposed the changes to bring British spelling in line with international standards are dumbfounded by the fuss, which they say has been whipped up by an unscientific lot of “Oxbridge classics graduates” working in the media.

“It defies belief,” said John Lawrence, deputy chief executive of the Assn. of Science Education, which represents about 24,000 science teachers. “It appears the press has nothing better to do at the moment than make up a story on the death of English and the Americanization of the English language.”

The Royal Society of Chemistry issued its own statement on the subject.

“An internationally agreed nomenclature is essential for science. This ensures that scientists can communicate with each other clearly,” it said. Consistency is ever more important “as scientific information is searched electronically.”

The chemists went on to say that the internationally accepted spelling of aluminium and caesium are the U.S. versions: aluminum and cesium.

But even Lawrence acknowledges that taking on aluminium might be “going a word too far.”

Certainly the issue has stirred strong emotions. School Standards Minister Estelle Morris has taken a stand against the reforms. Her department issued a statement Wednesday that all national exams will continue to use conventional English spelling.

That undoubtedly will come as a relief to author Christopher Davies, a Briton living in Florida who wrote a letter to the Times published Wednesday.

“To adopt American spelling for scientific work would mean a degradation of British English which hitherto was known as International English,” Davies wrote. “Spelling changes should not be undertaken lightly.”

Dr. Robert MacDermott wrote from Kent, meanwhile, to note that the etymologically correct American spelling of fetus has been used by the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology since the late 1960s. In fact, he noted, most medical journals still using foetus “are from continental Europe or further afield.”

In other words, only spelling heathens use antiquated orthography. So British spellers, get with the programme.