the psychology of Gray/Grey

[Lynne Murphy]

Ron Butters says:

>But GREY and GRAY? I guess this must be some kind of back formation on the
>analogy of such homophones as TAIL and TALE (or PAIR, PEAR, and PARE), but
>the inference that the difference between a spelled E and a spelled A would
>signal a difference in SHADE of grey/gray strikes me as counterintuitive.
>Would one infer that COLOR&COLOUR have slightly different meanings, or
>THEATRE&THEATER?? Are there any other alternate spellings in which the
>semantic difference is one of degree rather than kind? Some spellings MAY BE
>fancy and some plain, but connotatively, not denotatively.

I'm with you on this.  I think people are associating the spellings
differently because of having seen them in different contexts--e.g.,
catalog(ue)s (heather grey, etc.) and paint tubes (Gray 7), but doubt
they truly have different denotations.  If it seems like they have
different denotations, then it's because different kinds of gr{e/a}y
are found in different contexts.  Of course, to (dis)prove (or at
least support) the claims of contrastive use, we'd need a corpus of
the past writing of the people who claim to use them contrastively
with sufficient occurrences of the words to come to a conclusion.

With theatre/theater, I'll bet that people will associate the former
with an art form and the latter with lecture or operating theaters.
But this, again, I think is an issue of style (use the more European
spelling for the more 'cultural' thing) rather than two lexical items
existing.  (To beat one of my favo(u)rite drums, it's a matter of
metalinguistic rather than linguistic knowledge.)

Orthographically yours,
Lyn(n(e))
--
M. Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 3AN    UK
phone:  +44(0)1273-678844
fax:    +44(0)1273-671320