Ever wonder why British and American spellings are different if we theoretically speak the same language? Color vs. colour, traveling vs. travelling, center vs. centre, aluminum vs. aluminium—are these inconsistencies merely some sadist's design to torment the multicultural child?* If so, Noah Webster was the man, but he thought he was making things easier.
We've been enjoying tremendously the Teaching Company lectures on the History of the English Language. I can't recommend it enough: we've learned many fascinating things about the evolution of our native tongue. Recently the course touched on American lexicographer Noah Webster.
Dictionary-making has long been a battle between descriptivism and prescriptivism: Should a dictionary merely reflect the language as it is, or should it be an authoritative recording of the language as it should be? Noah Webster came down on the side of the prescriptivists, and he had definite ideas of how to clean up and simplify the language bequeathed unto us by those Brits we had so recently sent packing.
So he changed colour to color and centre to center, which he decreed made more sense. Aluminum vs. aluminium is a more compicated story: Sir Humphry Davy, who named the element, kept changing his mind, calling it first alumium, then aluminum, then aluminium. Scientists preferred aluminium, but Noah Webster latched onto aluminum, and as the metal became common enough to enter popular discourse, to what did writers turn for authoritative spelling? Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language.
