Internet Killed Canadian Spelling

I love the internet. The internet is a fabulous thing. Hell, I am even making part of my living through the internet these days, but there has been one very unfortunate effect of the internet: The death of Canadian spelling.

I have always been a proud Canadian speller. I love all our extra "U's" - colour and neighbour just look wrong any other way. A cheque is something you take to the bank while a check is a tick mark or square of colour on cloth. Reversed "re's" seem to give words like centre and theatre a little extra je ne sai quoi. They just seem classier then their Americanized versions. I even go as far as to use archaic spellings for words that few Canucks even use, like oesophagus and paedeatrician (physiology classes in college were so much fun for me spelling wise). In grade school I would spell jail like "gaol" just because it is spelled like that in England and Australia - I'm telling ya, I love archaic spelling. If there was an extra vowel I could throw in to a word, it went in there. It seems wrong just to get rid of them because they're redundant. Poor little vowels.

Programming in HTML was the beginning of my resignation to American spellings. At first, it broke my heart to have to type "center" in order to centre headlines on the page. I am ashamed to admit that I barely even notice anymore. When I started writing for wrestling.com, my editor warned me that all my words would be changed to the American versions. I stubbornly wrote everything with Canadian spellings for the first few articles then, when asked, dejectedly reset the spell check on my word processor to "English (United States)". Now little, red, squiggly lines underneath them sully all my beautiful, vowel-filled words while their bland counterparts are awarded their "correct" status. Sigh.

Maybe the extra vowels are extraneous. But other than the word "eh" and a notorious politeness, we Canadians haven't got all that much left to differentiate ourselves from our Southern neighbours (other than the French on all our labels. But how else could cereal boxes and shampoo bottles be so educational?). I'm not America bashing at all here, but we are a different culture, and wacky spelling was one of the few ways we could clearly emphasize it in writing.

The internet has changed all that. And I think we are poorer for it.