Remember, girl here, Saturday is the 4th of July, also known as the American Holiday

Independence Day.

I'm American, and I think it's fair to say we love the British now.

We give British royalty a royal welcome when they visit America.

But Saturday is the day we celebrate our independence from Britain.

And people often ask me why there are differences between American and British English.

So this seems like a good time to answer that question.

The first question is why British and American spellings are different for certain words.

The first answer is to blame Noah Webster of Webster's Dictionary fame.

He believed it was important for America a new and revolutionary nation to assert its

cultural independence from Britain through language.

He wrote the first American spelling, grammar, and reading schoolbooks and the first American

dictionary.

He was also an ardent advocate of spelling reform and thought words should be spelled

more like they sound.

Many years before he published his well-known American Dictionary of the English language,

he published a much smaller, more radical dictionary he called a compendious dictionary.

That included spelling such as WIMEMEN for women and TUNG for tongue.

That dictionary was not well received, it was skewered, and he dialed it back on the

spelling reform for his final masterpiece.

Yet still, Noah Webster in his affection for spelling reform and the success of his final

dictionary in 1828 are the reasons American spell words such as favor without a U,

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