Spelling war of the worlds

Let's get one thing straight. I'm not awesome at spelling. I know some stuff, but I've also made some spelling mistakes along the way. As a young child I pointed out to my mother the misspelling of Sydney as Sidney in the credits of I dream of Jeannie. She explained that it was ok because it was someone's name then went on to praise my prodigy-like spelling genius. Years later I misspelled believe in a spelling bee. My disappointed Aunty told me that if you never tell a lie people will always believe you. Never misspelled that one again. Many many years later I began frequently misspelling words that I had to americanise in the coding of websites, I was leaving the u's out of words in emails all over the place, it was like the end of days. For my spelling dignity.  

Therein lies the very issue. Us versus them. QE versus NAE. English versus American. Is the Americanisation of English that bad? It uses less letters which means less ink in printing, maybe even less pages in books, maybe it even means less spelling mistakes! One things for certain, it means less points in scrabble, and that's possibly a deal breaker!

This came up as a hot topic recently with a client; we're working on a book that tells Indigenous kids' stories, with an American author who has spent time on the APY Lands in South Australia. He captures the kids' voices so beautifully, spanning a gamut of emotions in the process, and does it all in US English. As I was typesetting the book it kept slapping me in the face. Color. Honor. Humor. Traveling. Tires. Neighbors. But this was an Australian book, about Indigenous kids and their families. I agonised over it. Over spelling. Did it matter? The author is American. The audience is global. The story is Australian. So what's the spelling hierarchy?!

For me, it felt strange to see Australian slang words like fellas butted up against US English spelling. Where are all the goddamned letter u's? So we had an open discussion about it. The final decision was made to use US English, with the comment given that Aussie kids will be ok with reading US spelling as they're used to it, but that globally there may be more challenges to others to read the Queen's English. So the u's remain missing and I remain confused. In an Australian story, Aussie characters are speaking to one another in American. Nope. Sorry. Does not compute. But maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe, we should just adopt US English spelling. 

No really, I mean it! Other than giving me more scrabble points, what are all those u's I fought for actually doing? They're taking up space, making words longer than necessary and messing with my spellcheck. Should we actually consider streamlining our language? How is it even acceptable for there to be so many different kinds of English? Slang is excluded of course, but for the rest of our proper sentences, being just-slightly-different-but-mostly-the-same seems kinda stupid. I can't even imagine how hard it must be to learn English as a second language. 

English is like the window-licker on the bus of languages. Their. They're. There. I said it. Word.