US/UK spellings - yup, that hoary old chestnut again... : comments [Welcome to my perfumed garden]

'it looks so much greyer than "gray" does'
Hee. That is just so 'you'. (o:

If I eventually decide to change the spelling it will be because you feel it's important. I don;t but I respect your opinion, hon.

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::looks defensive:: It *does* -- "e" is silvery-grey and "a" is charcoal-gray. Sorta. (See, silver has an "e" in it and charcoal has two "a"s -- which has to mean something, right? even though I never actually thought of it that way before. But I now realize I tend to want to use 'gray' only when I'm picturing darker shades. Oy. ::pretends she is perfectly sane and a responsible member of society:: Moving right along...)

-- "If I eventually decide to change the spelling it will be because you feel it's important. I don;t but I respect your opinion, hon." Shit, Gilly. That's beyond nice of you to say, but please don't change the spelling because of me babbling on about spelling in general! I find myself tongue-tied at the prospect and flailing my hands at you. (And anyway, I think back to when I first read your fics -- months and months before I met you; had no clue about where you live -- I don't remember ever feeling sidetracked by anything British, just wowed and completely caught up by the stories. That doesn't change, won't change. So you shouldn't change because of anybody else's thoughts, especially Many-Shades-of-Grey/Gray Me. !!)

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Many-Shades-of-Grey/Gray

That's it! I use 'grey' in preference to 'gray' (forget which is American and which is Brit, actually), and I couldn't figure out why. Partly it looks 'greyer' to me, but why? It just hit me... Have you ever read the 'Fafherd and the Grey Mouser' books? (Not sure of the spelling for Fafherd, and I forget the author -- SciFi/fantasy). Anyway, I read three or four of them, back when I was young; I guess that spelling just seeped into my subconscious.
.

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"A" is American, "E" British -- but most of the time when I write it I almost feel compelled to use 'e' because of its lovely greyness.

And yes, I loved the Grey Mouser! I read as many of those books as I could get my hands on and still every now and then think of them fondly ::adds them to impossibly long To Read Again list:: I was thoroughly taken by that character and the friendship between the two heroes/anti-heroes. ::beams, wishing she had a stack of the books in front of her right now (like she has time to read them)::

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Gray/grey -- I didn't have a clue which was which. I don't think anything about words being spelled differntly for different dialects/countries was ever mentioned when I was in school. On the other hand, since I spent a lot of time daydreaming about flying around with Peter Pan or living in the wilderness, I could have entirely missed the lesson.

Laurie

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Did you ever read My Side of the Mountain, with the boy who goes and lives inside a tree in the wilderness for months, on his own? Man, I loved that book. It was wonderful. I so wanted to do that... Of course, I wouldn't have minded flying, either. Peter Pan was just magic...

Hmm... I don't think they taught us anything about different spellings in my schools, either; I just was a Tolkien junkie and re-read David Copperfield once a year and adored British-English books -- anything I could get my hands on. Britain was absolutely my spiritual home back then and I probably just absorbed some awareness of the spelling by osmosis.

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'Did you ever read My Side of the Mountain, with the boy who goes and lives inside a tree in the wilderness for months, on his own?'
YES!!! Geoff Guthrie read it to us in second year when I'd've been 8 or 9. Oh God I LOVED that book!

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::beams and squees with Gilly:: And you know Blandings Castle, too, and being covered in leeches is a very big interest of yours -- the Ideal Renaissance Person. ::beams some more, incandescently::

Funny, though -- most of the time I was prejudiced against American books while I was growing up (not Dr. Seuss, of course! But books for older kids). I wanted to be in England and I wanted to read books that were set in England. American stories were (almost) always matter-of-fact and ordinary and preachy. British books seemed to hold universes of fantasy and beauty and fascinating people, and seemed less about An Uplifting And Moral Story than about a real story. And I am feeling extremely nostalgic... so *many* fabulous books I wanted to live inside...

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Ah, if only life was like it is in the books... (o:

I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. I fear I may have a romanticised view of America because of it *g*

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Did you ever read My Side of the Mountain, with the boy who goes and lives inside a tree in the wilderness for months, on his own? Man, I loved that book. It was wonderful

Read it, re-read it, made sure my brothers and sisters read it, my children read it, re-read it as an adult. It was one of the major influences on my current lifestyle, that and watching How the West Was Won three times,(school trip, Girl Scouts, and with family) on the big screen theatre. There was this lyric sung to the tune of Greensleves that I fell in love with and imprinted on my mind.

Come way, come way, come way with me
Where the hills are high and the grass is green.
Come, come to the wonderous land
and I'll build you a home in the meadow

So, when my I met my husband and he was telling me the same thing...

Well, between those two influences from my childhood, plus the hippie stuff..
I was hooked and that 's why I'm living in Kentucky, in a beautiful holler, surrounded by trees, with a creek in the yard.
Laurie

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Well I do respect you - be glad; I respect so few... *g*

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