this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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It was just the other day I wrote in a Canadian thread, how cheque vs check was the only spelling difference that made me irrationally angry at anyone using the latter in a Canadian financial context.
Wait I don't understand why it would be check
Check means to check something, or to check something is correct
Cheque is a piece of paper used to transfer money. In the olden days you didn't get the money put straight into a bank account you literally got a bankers cheque which you payed in. So it was literally a "pay cheque"
Who spells it paycheck? I assume that's Americans. But it says something that even Canada doesn't spell it like that.
In American English, those pieces of paper are also known as checks. Stupid, right?
Cheques and balances.
Right.
Right.
I will never understand why Americans always seem to have to change the spelling of words.
See this piece of incredibly ubiquitous metal? It's got a name already, but we don't like the name that everyone else calls it by, so we're going to call it by a different name for no reason, but we're not going to do it for any other material, just this one, that makes sense.
Americans didn’t call it aluminum first. British chemist Humphry Davy, the damn guy who isolated and named it, originally named it aluminum in 1812.
He called it aluminum to match the sound of platinum, which was a highly prestigious metal.
Thomas Young suggested aluminium after reading Davys book, because it matched other metals more closely.
Americans (specifically gained ground with Noah Webster of the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary (originally titled An American Dictionary of the English Language) fame) changed a lot of words to standardize and simplify their spelling that was still phonetically similar. Keep in mind that many Americans at the time in the country spoke many different languages in different enclaves and that this took place soon after the US gained independence from Britain. Notably Webster learned 28 languages to study the entomology in order to facilitate this standardization.
For example, 'k' was dropped from the end of words like musick and publick, which was already adopted by the British public(k) commonly at the time anyway. Another example was dropping the extra 'l' (L) in words like travelling.
Then again, cheque became check and not chec. The British also use 'check' from the word 'eschequier' in the context of Chess, which is also where 'cheque' in paycheque comes from. A check against the king. A cheque against forgery. So why not 'chec'? Because 'check' was also commonly interchanged by everyone the world over anyway for checque and chèque in business before the United States existed. In business between many peoples, why add another word that may be confusing when 'check' is close enough to what Webster and others were trying to accomplish?
Looking at it through the lens of the time and the context of the US populace, it seems logical as many of the changes were readily accepted by the diverse population of the US. It may not now while merely considering it from today's perspective.
Excuse us for spelling irun correctly
American English didn't "change" things to be different from other forms of English, it inhereted words from different spellings in Middle English & Early Modern English (usually based on regional dialects and unique writing styles of different historical writers) just like any other dialect. General American/Canadian/British English all adopted different standards for the spelling, there's no "correct" way.
Just be glad we don't typically use dozens of variations of spellings for most words anymore...
As a Canadian, I feel you. I couldn't give less of a fuck about colour but if you say 'check' to me when you're talking about a 'cheque' then we're gonna have words and none of them will be sorry.
Queue is another one that shits me when people spell it "cue" or something.