Taking care of three kids age five and under is full of interruptions, demands, cleaning up crumbs, and never sleeping more than four hours straight, like, ever. So, my brain is both in survival mode and at capacity. Blogging, as a non-essential activity, has been moved to the back burner. I think about it often, but seldom actually write words for it. However, since all my non-essential outside-the-home activities are currently canceled, here I am on the blog!
The English language is fascinating, wonderful, and sometimes a real pain. Today’s topic falls under “fascinating,” in my humble opinion. I do have a bachelor’s degree in English, so I think I’m allowed to have opinions on the subject.
Is it cancelled or canceled?
Gotta love English: both are accepted correct past tense forms of cancel.
Well, that’s interesting. Why?
Cancelled is the original form and generally “preferred” (more widely used) in the UK and most English-speaking places. Canceled is generally preferred in American English. Similarly to how we (Americans) dropped the u from colour, to get our color, we simply dropped the “extra” l in cancelled to get canceled.
I’ve read differing explanations of why this happened. One—the, in my opinion, more boring and more ridiculously ’MERICA explanation—says that Mr. Webster, our trusted dictionary editor, just “decided” we didn’t need some of those “extra” letters the British use, and printed his new dictionary with the changes; over time they came to be accepted correct spellings in America.
The story I like better is that canceled and color first came into use in newspapers, where character space was limited. By dropping “superfluous” letters, printers could use less ink or fit more news on a page. And again, those spellings came to be accepted as correct over time.
#capitalism
The same is true of cancelling vs. canceling; however, cancellation (double l) is the only accepted correct spelling of the noun form of cancel, everywhere.
English is silly
Lately I’ve been working on spelling, reading, and sounding out words with my five-year-old. She loves to practice writing: her preference is that I dictate letters and she write them, but I often make her try sounding it out. She’s quite good at beginning-of-word sounds and clear-cut consonants, but vowels and consonant-combos are hard! Yes, there are rules, but there are so many exceptions to those rules that I hardly bother to teach my budding speller those rules, for now.
One day, she said she wanted to write: “I love school. I like to write. Miryam loves chocolate.” (That’s my girl.) I had her sound out some of it. I gave her lots of freebies, too. And I began explaining the “silent e.” Every time:
Miryam: Why is there a silent e??
Me: Because English is silly.
Let me be clear: I love English! (Cf. My college major above.) I love the extensive vocabulary, due to having words from both romantic and Germanic influences: I love the subtlety of definition and connotation that allows. I love knowing that ages ago, knife was said more like “kuh-niff-uh”—those silly silent letters weren’t always silent. You can read here about The Great Vowel Shift (which also included a shift in the way some consonants were pronounced or not pronounced) to see what I mean.
So, the relationship between spelling and pronunciation is a long, complicated thing, which wasn’t always so silly as it sometimes seems now.
Isn’t that fascinating? (…or am I just a major language nerd??)
Please note: I did not make, nor do I own, the Lego “everything is cancelled” picture. Someone sent it to me, and I just loved it. If you know where it came from, let me know; I’d be happy to link to the original source. (And you know I would have used canceled rather than cancelled!)