Straight Mother Hubbard: My Moods: American Spelling

I HAVEN’T DONE THIS for a while, but today I thought I’d jot down on paper before I post, in the hopes of coming up with something more “thoughtful”. Hmmm... I'm reading it back myself now. Not sure I was so successful..!

Well, the Quiz is on its way through cyberspace somewhere. (& STOP PRESS- I've just been tagged with another one!!) Wasn’t sure whether all those I “tagged” were strictly the type to post Q&A lists, but what the heck — I asked them. Also, the last three people I know I don’t know yous very well (Raymi’s Mom I don’t know at all but I read her daughter’s blog)…

… Anyway, as they say; it’s all “just a bit of fun” & noting to stress over answering or not.

Mother Hubbard surprised me this morning by turning down the opportunity to use. She said she’d had enough of being messed around by lying little so-n-soes and besides on Monday, a friend had shown up and she’d demolished £50 worth & felt (so she says) no better for it. Yesterday 100mg methadone sorted her out fine. So good on ya, Mother H.

(I’m not naïve enough to even pose the thought: is this a turning point? In the fullness of time the balance of probabilities will most probably label today as an aberration. But who knows? Who am I to pre-empt time’s mysterious fullness?)

A flash of depression this afternoon cast a brief & frightening light across my pit-fallen life. I’ve done very little with the past handful of years, bar survive. In the most elementary living-breathing kind of way. My flash didn’t so much entail pondering nihilistic thoughts as merely FEELING this endless emptiness. And like the best illusions, it reached on, neverending, into infinity.

Okay, misery’s over. What I DID notice re yesterday’s quiz answers, three who’ve answered ALL remarked on the Brit spellings “favourite colour” etc. All 3/3 of them!! (The questions came to me as an Anglo-American hotchpotch. I couldn’t resist going through and adding missing “u”s…

I used to work in printing many years ago, which has made me far hotter on spelling and punctuation than I would otherwise be. (I am aware of my idiosyncratic use of the colon-dash (:—) among other things. And I know I spelt sentence with an A the other day. (See somewhere below.))

One thing you Americans probably don’t realize (or realise, if you prefer) — you hear Brit writers remarking on this a lot. When an American novel is published here, nothing is altered. All cultural and factual references, expressions and so on, they all go straight to press unedited — spelling included. The only (slightly bizarre) concession to British printing protocol is that dialogue will always appear in ‘single’ inverted commas as opposed to the American “double” — that I choose to use.

American editions of Brit books, by contrast, are edited so heavily for “clarity” that many authors feel the unique “flavour” of their work has been quite vanilla’d out. Ian Rankin of Detective Reebus fame, recently complained that the Stateside edition of his latest actually had “pavement” translated…!

Did Barbra Streisand sing in Memories:—

“Midnight — not a sound from the sidewalk…”??

… But you try telling Random House New York that.

Some Brit authors do, of course, get territorial about our colourful added “u”s, French-looking “centres”, mediaeval “æ”s & foetal “œ”s. Some of our renditions look foreign even to me. Ie. The straightforward American “maneuver” our dictionaries insist we spell “manoeuvre” — very Inspector Cluseau, don’t you think?!?

As for American spellings, I suspect the entire world will be using them in a couple of generations’ time. They are just as historically valid as our British versions. After all, in the 1550s, Queen Elizabeth I penned an epistle to a supporter to squash false “rumors” of her being sequestered in the Tower of London. She mentions these “rumors” several more times throughout the letter — never inserting a so-called British “u” — makes mention of her “honor” — and promptly signs off. I saw this, in the lady’s own handwriting, with my very own eyes. So if rumors and honor are good enough for the Queen of England, they ought to be good enough for the rest of us.

Righto. Slight tangent there…

Not too much to tell by way of news. Mousey’s sleeping, Marilyn’s upset because her grandson’s got dyspraxia (co-ordination probs). And to the best of my knowledge, Mother Hubbard, nearly 12 hours later, still has money in her purse and methadone in her belly — and has YET TO CAVE IN.