Quote Originally Posted by kilted scholar View Post
The second concerns the English language. My mother was English. I was taught that deviation from the OED was little short of criminal.

...The genie is now well and truly out of the bottle and a language spoken originally in one country has spread, evolved and developed in countless ways elsewhere.
You are touching on two quite different topics: 1) English dictionaries/written English; 2) spoken English.

About dictionaries and written English, it's a pet peeve of mine, the way that a single man, Noah Webster, succeeded in corrupting the spelling of an entire continent. He was able to do so because he existed at just the right time: the very notion that words ought to be spelled in a certain fixed way was just gaining ground, and in the years immediately following the American Revolution there was strong feeling that Americans should not follow British examples but do things their own way.

So he wrote his dictionary, purposefully ignoring the most-common traditional spellings and creating his own en masse. What had more impact than his dictionary was his elementary speller: it was one of the best-selling books of 19th century America and generations of kids here learned how to spell from it.

Now spoken English is an entirely different matter. Since Elizabethan times, the spoken Englishes of England and America have continued to evolve at more or less equal rates. There are many words in common use in America which have not been in common use in England for 400 years, and visa versa. (This happens whenever a speech community is geographically seperated.)

So in many respects modern American English is closer to Elizabethan English than modern London English is, and a modern Englishman who feels that his speech is more traditionally English than American speech is, is partly right and partly wrong.