Has anyone else seen the new Harry Potter movie yet? If you haven't, no worries, this isn't a spoiler-ish post. It's more about this little issue of mine.
It's a curse, really. For some reason I have an eye for misspellings. And they bug me. A lot.
So when Harry and his friends received their new Defence against dark arts textbooks I was irritated. Why? Because it's spelled Defense darn it! I was probably the only person in the theater (and possibly the city... county... state...) that noticed the spelling on the cover of the book in the movie. After all, why should anyone notice?!
And this error distracted me for some time, while I watched the movie. I wondered, was it on purpose? Or was it completely by accident?
Turns out... it was neither. "Defence" is a perfectly legitimate British spelling.
I feel much better now. But it still looks wrong to me.
Explanation of American and British English Spelling differences
Dictionary entry... with both spellings
4 comments:
I picked this up in my feed reader, and it didn't show where you came to the conclusion is was not wrong.
So I was coming here to tell you about the differences in spelling between American english and merry ol England's english. Something I ran into working on cfeclipse. Where 3 of the 65main developers have been from that side of the pond.
But since you figured it out, I will just say "happy monday".
I was reading recently that the books are tweaked for American consumption when they are published, with American words and spellings substituted for some British ones (like color instead of colour).
I've heard about the "tweaking" too. In fact, the first book has a different TITLE in the UK (Philosopher's Stone).
Happy Monday to you too, Sim! ;)
Jen, I could have saved you all the heartache had you asked me...I grew up in Canada and read countless British books as a wee lad. I've even learned not to drive over the kerb!
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