The Random Traveller/Traveler

Language is a funny thing: full of conventions, rules, stipulations, exceptions, contradictions and a rich lush history. It is amazing what we can find out about language through the words and spellings. I teach my students to look at unfamiliar words and see if there are parts of words that seem similar to others. I teach them Latin and Greek roots and their meanings. I get into it.

Spelling has always been important to me, however in my rush to get ideas down, I may ignore misspellings only to hope that upon proofreading I am able to catch any errors. I teach my students that spelling is vital, but getting your thoughts down is what is most important. All the energy spent on editing can come later. That works in theory, but not always perfectly.

Spellchecking tools have made us lazy and often do not catch mistakes since our language is full of strange words in both spelling and meaning. In addition to all this murky soup we have to navigate, wonderful Noah Webster decided to take it upon himself to make some changes in the spelling of words to make America's English decidedly American. When you are the author of a dictionary you end up having quite a bit of influence on language like that. Colour ----> Color.

However, the history of English, and living languages in general, is more like an evolution of spelling. If you look at historical documents or literature from several centuries ago you find alternate spellings for words you recognize. Until you get a codified set of spellings or rules ( a la Academie francaise) spellings, pronunciations and usage changes like the path of a river. While the British may have been bemoaning America's bastardization of their mother tongue, scholars had been debating the use of -or and -our for some time.
Check out this post from wisegeek.com:
http://www.wisegeek.com/why-does-british-spelling-keep-the-u-in-words-like-colour.htm

What got me thinking about this today is this: I noticed recently that my spelling of "Traveller" is essentially correct, however, it is the British spelling of the word, not American. I find it funny that took me several years to find this out and never really thought about it. Spellcheck didn't find it. I came across the differences quite by accident. Being an American, am I going to change it? Nah, I've kinda gotten attached to it. I think it gives it a certain international flavour.