Gramer Girl here, I'm Minion Foggedy.

This week I have a quick and dirty tip about the difference between words for smells, and

a tidbit about the phrase battle royale.

But we're going to start with an excerpt from a new book by Lynn Murphy that I absolutely

loved.

The prodigal tongue, the love-hate relationship between American and British English.

She is an American linguist who spent much of her adult life living and teaching in

Britain and noticing and documenting the differences between the two languages and cultures.

The book was so great I had a hard time choosing a section to excerpt, but over the years

many of you have asked why some words used the ISE suffix, and other words used the

IZE suffix.

And she had a section on that topic, so that's what you're going to hear now.

In 2012, a British learning disability charity quizzed over 2,000 adults on their spelling,

and found that about a third could not spell the word definitely.

The headlines that followed proclaimed that the population had become too dependent on

spell checkers, which had ruined our ability to spell.

Those headlines made me more concerned for the population's critical reasoning faculties

than for their spelling.

The fact that a lot of people in 2012 couldn't spell tells us only that a lot of people in

2012 couldn't spell.

Unless we know how well people in 1972 spelled, we can't know that spelling skills have

worsened.

...