Subtle Grammar Quirks That Are More Common in American English Than British English

The incredibly candid Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond shared several grammatical quirks that are more common in American English than in British English due to dialectal differences.

I found that certain mistakes show up more regularly in the United States. Before you all lose your blooming minds, this is not poking fun at Americans. It’s just language errors that aren’t probable in British English because we don’t always have the same dialectal properties as America.

While Brown listed a number of these errors, the one he found most interesting was the word “glamour”. In the 19th century Noah Webster, of dictionary fame, spearheaded the movement to return American English to its Latin roots and differentiate it from British English by removing the “u” after “o” in such words as colour (color), neighbour (neighbor), favour (favor). Words such as glamour are exceptions to this rule.

Perhaps the most notable is the word glamour, which is typically spelled with the UR suffix in both Britain and the United States. And here’s where things get completely and utterly a little bit impressive. Because this wasn’t some accident or weird quirk of history. It was done by design. You see, American lexographers changed most UR words to OR words because this is how they were originally spelled in Latin. But glamour was different. Glamour had no presence in Latin.

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