Squiggly red lines.

As what some may call an overly grammar-conscious individual, I pride myself on my proofreading skills. I'm the kind of person who uses punctuation in text messages, and I never send an email without rereading it. So imagine my horror when I realiz(s)ed that, upon arriving in Britain, pretty much everything I'd ever written instantly became littered with spelling errors.

And it's all because British people spell things wrong weird. 

It really does make a difference.

 Consider, for example, the following words I had to change in a document, simply because it was drafted in our DC office, and we needed a UK version. The American spelling is listed first:

program v. programme

center v. centre

analyze v. analyse

color v. colour

revitalizing v. revitalising

pediatric v. paediatric

counseling v. counselling

mobilized v. mobilised

dispatched v. despatched

maximizes v. maximises

organizational v. organisational

You may have noticed that Brits don't really care for the letter 'z', but they are quite happy to add extra letters and move others around, often in blatant disregard of phonetics.

After a year here, most of which has been spent writing academic papers, I've grown accustomed to these silly spellings. Perhaps too accustomed, as I'll occasionally accidentally use a British spelling when writing to an American friend. (Incidentally, this always makes me feel like a bit of a traitor.) But I typically try to adjust my spelling based on who will be reading it. Kind of like how I talk football with my housemates, but soccer with my friends from home.

Anyway, many of these American spellings are widely accepted, even if they're not preferred. As I'm writing this with a UK spellcheck, the words center,  analyze, color, pediatric, and counseling all have squiggly red lines below them. However, the others aren't flagged as incorrect. 

This can be problematic, because sometimes when I'm editing things for work, I won't catch them -- either out of habit or ignorance (my untrained American eyes refuse to believe that 'program' is missing some letters.) -- and neither will spell check. 

And then I get made fun of.

But not anywhere near as much as the first time my coworkers heard me say the word, "y'all." That was a whole nother level of hilarity, my friends.

Happy Monday, and may your computer's spell check be ever more zealous than mine.