Member-only story
Gray
The American spelling
I am an old fart. By Medium standards that means that I am over the age of 35. For well over a half century I have been spelling the word, gray, with an ‘a,’ the American spelling, rather than with an ‘e,’ the British spelling. As with hundreds of millions of Americans, that is how we were taught to spell the word in school.
But all that changed just a few short years ago when a British novelist came out with a series of novels about sado-masochism. The novels have been turned into movies. The movies have been humongous hits and somehow those movies have convinced hundreds of millions of Americans to switch their spelling of gray to grey.
We Americans used to learn how to spell in school. Now we learn how to spell at the movie theater.
Seriously?
And all because of the popularity of sado-masochism?
Seriously?
It utterly blows my mind that an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people would suddenly and collectively change their spelling of gray to grey just because of a series of Hollywood movies about sado-masochism. Even authors that I’ve been reading for around half a century suddenly switched their spelling of the word because of those movies.
