exotic sock colour-names

[OC Richard]

OCR....
Glad to see you've learned how to spell "colour"...

My spelling has always been a mess because I grew up in a house where half the books were British editions. Many American spellings never looked quite right to me, and in some cases I forget which spelling is which. I'll never forget when a grade-school teacher marked me wrong on a spelling test, and my father went down to the school and let her know otherwise.

I found it very interesting how our first Harry Potter book, an American edition, changed all the British spellings and grammar (verb phrase ellipsis and such) but our edition of The Deathly Hallows freely mixed British and American spellings and grammar.

A noteworthy exception is that from the get-go the American editions left the British "ginger" alone thus popularising a new word in the American lexicon. I don't think until Harry Potter that many American kids (or adults) would have known what "a ginger" was.