I watched an interesting program on the History Channel a few weeks ago about the history of American English.
[q]The History of American English
(Language history)
The history of American English can be divided into the colonial (1607-1776), the national (1776-1898), and the international (1898-present) periods. During nearly four hundred years of use in North America, the English language changed in small ways in pronunciation and grammar but extensively in vocabulary and in the attitude of its speakers.
English settlements along the Atlantic Coast during the seventeenth century provided the foundation for English as a permanent language in the New World. But the English of the American colonies was bound to become distinct from that of the motherland. When people do not talk with one another, they begin to talk differently. The Atlantic Ocean served as an effective barrier to oral communication between the colonists and those who stayed in England, ensuring that their speech would evolve in different directions.
[...]
Americans also came cheek-to-jowl with Amerindians of several linguistic stocks, as well as French and Dutch speakers. They had to talk in new ways to communicate with their new neighbors. Moreover, the settlers had come from various districts and social groups of England, so there was a homogenizing effect: those in a given colony came to talk more like one another and less like any particular community in England. All these influences combined to make American English a distinct variety of the language.
Despite such changes, the norm of usage in the colonies remained that of the motherland until the American Revolution. Thereafter American English was no longer a colonial variety of the English of London but had entered its national period. Political independence was soon followed by cultural independence, of which a notable Founding Father was Noah Webster. As a schoolmaster, Webster recognized that the new nation needed a sense of linguistic identity. Accordingly he set out to provide dictionaries and textbooks for recording and teaching American English with American models. The need Webster sought to fill was twofold: to help Americans realize they should no longer look to England for a standard of usage and to foster a reasonable degree of uniformity in American English. To those ends, Webster's dictionary, reader, grammar, and blue-backed speller were major forces for institutionalizing what he called Federal English.
(extract from The History Channel site by John Algeo) [/q]
So blame Noah Webster for the confusion!
[q]http://www.lexrex.com/bios/nwebster.htm
When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different
parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He thought that all Americans should speak
the same way. He also thought that Americans should not speak and spell just like the English.
Noah used American spellings like "color" instead of the English "colour" and "music" instead " of "musick". He
also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like "skunk" and "squash". It took him over 27
years to write his book. When finished in 1828, at the age of 70, Noah's dictionary had 70,000 words in it[/q]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences
I've always spelled with the "u" (in most words that have it...I'm sure there are some I don't) just because I like words better with it. I'm a yom.
