I’ve had a quick look at TW 5.2.1 prerelease to read about the new filter cascade mechanism.
In the Control Panel > Advanced > Cascades > Tiddler Colour, I noticed that ‘colour’ is used 6 times, whereas ‘color’ is used 3 times. 2 system tiddlers use both words in their names!
I would tend to think that using two different spellings for the same word in a ‘code-writing’ context might be prone to confusion and memory overload from users. My two (euro)cents, as a non-native English speaker. What do you think?
The closer you get to HTML, CSS, or Javascript the more likely you are to see “color” because that’s the usage within those domains.
Which is odd, when you think of it. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the WWW and chair of the W3C, is British. So how did “color” get in? Maybe back in the days of 300 Baud modems getting rid of an extra letter seemed like a good idea?
Right. International computerese, especially code, is dominantly American English. Tiddlywiki main site is mostly, at surface level, in British English.
FWIW, I don’t think that difference is a problem. It is just a matter of different conventions for different levels.
There are a lot of possibilities for confusion. For example, most Americans don’t realize that in British English, rebooting a computer means throwing it back into the trunk of one’s car.
I’m with TT, in prose, it really doesn’t matter, as long as people can understand you. Just like in speech, no one cares if you’re thinking “its” but say “it’s”.
A college prof once mentioned he would spell “organi(S|Z)ation” with either a “z” or “s” based on the most recent book he’d read, pointing out along the way, the “z” spelling first appeared in an English dictionary, not American. How true that is, I don’t know.
But when the American’s decided (actually, did they?) to use “ize” over “ise”, I wish they’d been more consistent. For example, I was surprised to learn…
As for -our words becoming -or words, I just wish the shortening had been consistent – see you in court.
But burglarize ??? Oh c’mon. The verb is to burgle for crying out loud.
And as for “off of”… don’t get me started (oh wait, you did)
“Gargla rising”: potential horror film in which the birds have had it and go on a killing spree in Great Britain and Ireland, but only pecking out those poor sods who insist on calling the little feathered freaks “jays.”
