theatre

[Nancy Elliott]

If I go to a theatre, I see a live play. If I go to a theater, I see a
movie.  As for edifices, here at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, our three
performance buildings are spelled with the -re version, which I'm sure is
the case at every Shakespeare/Shakespearean festival in the U.S. What about
non-Shakespearean stage performance edifices? (Medford's got the Craterian
Ginger Rogers Theatre, named after both Crater Lake and the star of the
silver screen...)

Fortunately, my spell-checker lets me use both theater and theatre.



Nancy Elliott
Southern Oregon University, Ashland


Aside: is the Utah Shakespearean Festival the only one in the U.S. that uses
'Shakespearean Festival' instead of 'Shakespeare Festival' (Alabama, Oregon,
Colorado...) in its name?



> From: RonButters at AOL.COM
> Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 10:38:31 EDT
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: the psychology of Gray/Grey
>

> 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.