Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
11/1/2015 1:22:38 PM
Subject:
RE: sim
English is a mongrel and very malleable language. It's always been affected by commercialism, slang, translation, and a hundred other influences (see complaints by eighteenth-century periodical writers like Addison, Steele, Johnson, etc.). Spelling and usage up to the nineteenth century were all over the place. Authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries didn't worry much about spelling and left it to printers to normalize. Printers spelled in whatever ways suited their fancy or typeset.
Spelling started becoming standardized around 1850. The big British public education push in the 1860s helped it along.
"Ax" and "axe" have been used interchangeably in American English forever.
It's true
that "ax" was used more frequently here than the British "axe," but I think the spellings got mixed up before the Axe commercials came along.
Nonetheless, you are correct in saying that we should be alert to such slippages. When solid, wholesome American spelling standards are no longer sacred, it's only a matter of time before we're swept away in the great tsunami of permissiveness. We may poo-poo for a season, but we're only an "e" away from unrestrained savagery.
