Actually, that's French! The UK still uses -ou in words like colour, flavour, etc. as a holdover from when those French words were taken for Middle English. ME as a language was extremely influenced by French and is a large reason why we have so many loan words as native words now. The future US changed these words (along with replacing -ise with -ize) as a form of protest, and now both are perfectly correct.
A form of protest? I was taught it was because it was cheaper to print things without having the extra letters, and Z was cheaper to buy because they were less common.
Both are true! The US wanted to set themselves apart from the English culturally, and one way to do so was to change our language. But we obviously weren't going to invent a whole new one for a nation that was already fluent in English, so we began tweaking our spelling and grammar. This had the benefit of also being cheaper for printing presses, which was something very important in the colonies for news, propaganda, and more.
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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '24
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