@naivety: Forgive me if I nerd a bit about this:
Actually, it's "-our" basically everywhere except in the United States: e.g. Ireland, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Fiji, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Samoa, Namibia, the Seychelles, ... (bonus fun fact: the United Kingdom has never declared an official language afaik.) Few exceptions include some proper nouns like the "Labor Party" in EN-AU or "Arbor Day" in EN-NZ. Also whilst Canada technically does it the proper way, the unistat-oligarchy having monopolized the landscape there leaves the situation ... murky.
Anyway, the yank way of doing things actually falls back to some dude named Noah Webster (who wrote a somewhat famous dictionary). He rightfully recognized that English "orthography" is undeserving of that name (#bringbacktheyogh) and therefore tried to reform things in a much more phonetic "eye dialect" that removes superfluous letters and simplifies spelling (e.g. "blud" for "blood", "kee" for "key", "plow" for "plough", "laf" for "laugh", "tuf" for "tough", using k only for hard sounds as in "arkitecture"... you get the gist).
If you're an anglophone monolingual that might weird you out, but be assured that in the vast supermajority of (alphabetic) languages, a vowel(-digraph) only ever means one sound. (The only counterexample I know of is Arabic's Alif, but then we hit the borders of what can even be considered a vowel).
So frankly, for somebody with otherwise through-and-through american beliefs (including somehow "both sides"-ing the abolition of slavery) a highly agreeable position.
Sadly, it was proposed in a country with semiquincentennial track record of, when offered the options of "use the standard everybody else does" and "use a sensible system", consistently choosing the third option "do something else entirely that is neither interoperable nor good". In this case by apparently picking some proposals at random and applying them only with sporadic coverage. (I just learned it's spelled "glamour" in EN-US and I can't even...)
As another bonus, here Webster's 1828 dictionary entry on "woman" (and yes, the plural is "wimen"). Just, uh, don't go reading the whole thing
I have observed among all nations that the women ornament themselves more tan the men; that wherever found, they are the same kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender beings, inclined to be gay and cheerful, timorous and modest.
last edited at Jul 8, 2026 2:38AM
