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  • One thing I did when I was editing Dave Cross's Data Munging with Perl [] is to suggest changing a lot of Anglicisms that would have looked odd to US readers, because they were Anglicisms that most US readers would not know about. Almost none of it was words that didn't exist in the US; most of it was words or usages that exist just fine in the US, but where the most frequent use/sense in the UK is an infrequent sense/use in the US. "Whilst" is sort of an example of this: "whilst" is normal in the UK, but v
    • I was happy to accept your advice on all of those because although your suggestions were slightly "less British" they weren't completely "non British". They were still things that I could picture myself saying.

      The only change that I completely refused to accept was when the copy editor changed "would never have got to the end" to "would never have gotten to the end". That's simply not acceptable English and something that I would never say.

      In the end they allowed me my single "Britishism".

      My wife, who is

      • Yes, I thought that the idea of the words of a British person being set down in American spelling was, in theory, odd. But in practice, I don't think it was as weird as writing Ukranian in Russian orthography would be, or something comparable; the typical sentence of English doesn't allow one to distinguish UK spelling/content versus US spelling/content.

        Moreover, if they'd very logically decided to let you use UK spellings, they would never have been able to spell check it there, since all their spellcheckers no doubt have only US spelling files; and the copyeditors are ignorant of when US -ize maps to UK -ise versus UK -ize, and other tricky matters.