#9253583, By lucky_jim general isms that deserve to die by fire
• lucky_jim 27 Dec 2012 10:57:42 4,972 posts     Seen 1 hour ago
Registered 11 years ago     Some of those are plain wrong, dark.
If you want to while away an afternoon in a etymologically geeky
way, have a look at the origins of the s/z spellings of words
like recognise/recognize. It's not that long ago people would
have told you the "z" spelling was British and the "s" form
American: they would have been just as wrong as the people/ MS
Word spell checks who tell you the opposite. And their more
routine use of the Oxford comma makes a lot of sense, as does
their firmer rule on when to use "that" or "which".      That
said, having over the last couple of years moved from an English
language-based job with the UK government to a similar one with
an American multinational, it causes me actual pain to have to
"fix" the Britishisms that creep into a lot of our writing
(particularly our writers from Africa and the Middle East). Log
in or regist