What a lovely color!

Why is it that I can get on a plane, travel to the US and find myself experiencing the same language barriers I would having landed in Spain or ... I don't know ... Namibia? Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration but seriously, even being asked the most simple of questions like 'what time is it?' causes the person who asked it to stop in their tracks when I reply, 'half seven'.

Me being me, I set off to research why people over here say, or more importantly spell things the way they do. What caused such translations to take place in the first place? And thinking about it, although it's completely off subject, if I'm lacking organisation, am I unorganised or disorganised?

In fact, as I've since found out, it depends! Take for instance the notion of a woman whose desk is in a real state. Not organised if you will. If we were to say her desk and papers seem unorganized, things would be a bit of a mess but she could find anything she needed in a moment. If however, her desk and papers were disorganized, things would most definitely be in a mess and more importantly she could probably never lay her hands on whatever it is she needs.

So there's a fun lesson in the correct use of a word I like to use a lot but why do Americans say and spell things differently? American English and British English actually differ at the levels of phonology, phonetics, vocabulary, and, to a lesser extent, grammar and orthography.

The differences in grammar (as we know) are relatively minor, and normally do not affect mutual intelligibility. For instance these include, but are not limited to: different use of some verbal auxiliaries, formal (rather than notional) agreement with collective nouns, different preferences for the past forms of a few verbs (e.g. AmE/BrE: learned/learnt, burned/burnt, and in sneak, dive, get); different prepositions and adverbs in certain contexts (e.g. AmE in school, BrE at school); and whether or not a definite article is used, in very few cases (AmE to the hospital, BrE to hospital). Often, these differences are a matter of relative preferences rather than being absolute rules; and most are not stable, since the two varieties are constantly influencing each other.

But whatever, I think it's interesting...

Jonty x