Nah.....my dictionary has the main and variation the other way around!
I acknowledge the variation, maxsims, but you have just tempted me to explain it by resuscitating an essay that I wrote for my column in
The Manila Times way back in January 27, 2003. With your indulgence, here it goes:
How American English differs from British English On more than just a few occasions, I had been asked by friends and readers how American English and British English differ. I would be hesitant to answer because like most everybody else, all I really knew at the time was that British books and magazines routinely spelled English words ending in “-or” with “-our” instead, as in “honor” to “honour,” and those that ended in “–er” with “-re,” as in “center” to “centre.”
When I looked more closely into their differences, however, I found out that American English and British English vary in much more profound ways than spelling, word endings, and pronunciation. They still share a common linguistic system and a basic set of words, of course, but their differences had grown so vast that as early as 1887, the English playwright Oscar Wilde wryly observed: “We have everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” Today, over 120 years later, the variation has become much wider, prompting a language critic to make this irreverent remark on the Internet: “The English spoken in places like London, Manchester, and Liverpool is 98% identical to that spoken in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Only [a] 2% difference ...the same difference in the genes of the chimpanzee and the human!”*
This great divide between American English and British English was no doubt created by the power of mass migrations, of the printed word, and of the mass media to transmute language, but I believe that it was pushed irreversibly by the indomitable will of one man. That man was the largely self-taught American lexicographer Noah Webster. Unable to pursue law studies after graduating from Yale College in 1778, he decided to work as a teacher. He was appalled by the dearth of teaching materials in American schools, where as many as 70 pupils of all ages would be jammed into one-room affairs, taught by untrained teachers, using badly written books. He thus wrote
A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, a textbook on English reading, spelling, and pronunciation that was to become the most popular book of its time.
Webster, believing that Americans should all speak in the same way and not just imitate the British, later decided to write the first American dictionary. His most audacious innovation was simplifying British spelling. He saw no logical reason for using the letter “u” in such English words as “colour” and “labour,” nor for the “k” in such words as “musick” and “traffick,” so he knocked it off in all of them. He did away with the “-que” in words like “cheque” and “masque,” replacing it with “–ck,” and transposed the “–re” word endings to “–er” in words like “theatre” and “centre.” He also freely added new American words into his dictionary, like “skunk” and “squash.” When he finished
An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, after 27 years of work, it contained 70,000 words and their meanings—superior in quality and scope to the other English dictionaries of the time.
Even without Webster’s linguistic efforts, of course, American English and British English differ in vocabulary in many bewildering ways. As an outstanding example, “corn” in British English is all kinds of cereal before and after harvesting, but in American English it is “maize” (“grain” is the word it uses for all cereals). Here are just a few more Americanisms versus British English: “elevator” for “lift,” “trash” for “rubbish,” “faucet” for “tap,” “sidewalk” for “pavement,” and “chips” for “crisps.”
American English and British English also have striking grammar variations that could confuse nonnative English learners. They treat in an exactly opposite way grammatically singular nouns that are plural in sense. In American English, group words such as “company” and “team” are viewed as single entities, so they carry the singular verb form “is,” as in “the company
is...”; in British English, however, they are viewed as consisting of more than one person, so are considered plural, as in “the company
are...” Another marked difference is in their use of prepositions: “Londoners live
in a street and stay
in farm cottages
at weekends,” but “New Yorkers and English-speaking Manilans live
on a street and stay
in farm cottages
on weekends.”
You all know the rest of the story, of course. American English eventually got the upper hand over British English when the United States not only became a major racial melting pot and economic and military power but also the world’s most powerful cultural center. Through the Americans’ deft use of the language in their literature, movies, and print and broadcast media, American English is today the English of choice of those who must use it to communicate with the rest of the world.
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*"Only [a] 2% difference ...the same difference in the genes of the chimpanzee and the human!” I'm really not sure whose genes the commentator meant to correspond to those of the chimpanzee and to those of the human, but I think it's better left at that.
