[conspire] English 8-O

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> Written language, English, ... uhm ...
> 
> $ (cd /usr/share/dict && grep '^colou*ri[sz]e$' *english*) |
> >sed -e 's/^\([^-]*-english\)-[^:]*:\([^:]*\)$/\2 \1/' | sort -u
> colorize american-english
> colourise british-english
> colourize canadian-english
> $
> 
> Yes, I'm sure among others, this will also confuse the Canadian school
> children.  This is one of a very large number of reasons I did *not*
> major in English.

Well, after decades of speaking and exchanging mail with Yanks, Brits,
the Irish, Indians, Pakistanis, Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis, and Caribbean
islanders, I'm now hopelessly heterodox, anyway.  Any hope of writing
consistently like one thing or the other is long gone.

A few years ago, I ironed out an error I'd long indulged about the word
'licensing'.  As part of a doomed effort at consistent usage, I'd
settled on the Commonwealth spelling 'licence', which I knew was right
and looked right.  That seemed to imply 'licencing', so I started
writing that.

And I gradually realised that looked wrong -- which doesn't necessarily
signify, because after being whipsawed among multiple flavours of
English[1], many things _looked_ wrong.  But I checked, and the
Commonwealth usage is 'license' for the verb, 'licence' for the noun
(a distinction missing from American English).

Hence 'licensing' is correct spelling (in Commonwealth English[2]) for
the gerund form of the verb.

[1] E.g., many people kept telling the author of Trumpet Winsock that
the 'Dialler' menu was misspelled -- which it wasn't.  He's an Aussie.

[2] Certain OCD Wikipedians maintain there's no such thing as a
characteristic written English across the British Commonwealth, citing
localisms.  I'd say there's a very strong family resemblance among all
non-USA variants, except that Canadian English is the Switzerland
between the two, borrowing from both.