"Tom Galvin" <tga### [at] dataforgecom> wrote:

>>We (the collective 'we' here being, I suppose, any non-American English
>>speaker, though I can hardly profess to speak for all of them) don't mind
>>Americans changing the language in the least
>
>If we exclude the English and the Americans then we are left with the Kiwis,
>Aussies, Irish, Welsh and the Scots. Any one who has heard those
>interpretations of English should have little to say about American English.

Precisely. So we don't complain about their english, just about the fact that a
few of them rudely complain about _ours_.

This is the whole point, one that some readers have failed to 'get'. We're all
welcome to do whatever we like to our own regional variations of English. But
none of us should go about implying that someone else lacks intelligence (as
Jason did to us) because that other person uses their own, regional, variation
of English spelling (regardless of whether or not it is 'true' English as the
English spell it).

No-one here has said the Americans have it wrong, and the Aussies/Irish/Kiwis
etc. have it right. Just that we're not wrong, either (yes, it's possible for
both of us to be right).

Had I been an Australian user of a software package and had written to an
American firm rudely questioning their intelligence because they spelt minimise
with a 'z' then I would have been just as guilty. But I won't, because I know
that Americans have their own spelling and I respect that fact.

I've never yet personally come across a software package that does menu and
documentation spelling substitutions based on the country settings - not even
Microsoft Word [a likely candidate] does that. [FWIW Word does correctly mark
words such as 'minimize' as incorrectly spelt, and suggests the 's' variation,
when set to British English].

Therefore, software (for the time being) is likely to continue to come out with
its own regional spelling in documentation and menus, and there's little that
can be done about it except just accept it.

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