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goodmythical • yesterday at 8:25 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

But which English 20xx to use? The one that spells the phenomenon of our eyes rendering electromagnetic radiation as "colour" or the one that renders the same as "color"?

Grey or gray?

Is the building adjacent to the one across from you "kitty-corner", "katty-corner", "kitty-korner" or "katty-korner"?

Is the small freshwater crustacean a crayfish, crawfish, or crawdad?

Says who, mind you? Why would facebook adopt some FOSS English 20xx when it could implement it's own for advertising alignment purposes? What are the odds that google and facebook both land on identical implementations?


Replies

Veserv • yesterday at 9:55 PM

The one the people implementing the spell-checker want. I am describing a mechanism for change, not the policy.

It is a mechanism that is far more practical and likely to succeed at broad reform than their plan of convincing magazine editors and instagram models.

Tagbert • yesterday at 8:59 PM

Most of those are alternate words, not alternate spellings.

It would be helpful to start with some of the worst of the offending spellings such as the “ough” mess. And maybe remove some of the silent b’s with which we were debted by 18th century philologists.