[Ads-l] Word/Phrase: cancel, cancel culture, cancellation culture

[Ben Yagoda]

It’s 7.17 “cancelled”s per million words and 6.13 “canceled”s.—Ben

> Date:    Mon, 20 May 2019 13:22:51 -0400
> From:    Mark Mandel <mark.a.mandel at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Re: Word/Phrase: cancel, cancel culture, cancellation culture
> 
> To which I just replied:
> -----
> 
>    How’s that again? You wrote
>>>>>> 
>    Yes another database, the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, crunches
> a couple of billion words of text from 2012 and shows “cancelled” appearing
> 7.17 times per million words of text, compared to 6.13 for “cancelled.”
>    <<<<<
>    Mentally correcting "Yes" to "Yet" as an obvious typo is trivial, but
> which "cancel(l)ed" is which?
> 
> -----
> Mark Mandel
> 
> On Mon, May 20, 2019, 11:35 AM Ben Yagoda <byagoda at udel.edu> wrote:
> 
>> In which I answer the question Brian starts out with: 2000.
>> 
>> Or thereabouts.
>> 
>> http://notoneoffbritishisms.com/2019/05/20/double-l-spelling/ <
>> http://notoneoffbritishisms.com/2019/05/20/double-l-spelling/>
>> 
>> Ben
>>> 
>>> Date:    Thu, 16 May 2019 23:00:50 -0700
>>> From:    Bwh031451 <bwh031451 at GMAIL.COM>
>>> Subject: Word/Phrase: cancel, cancel culture, cancellation culture
>>> 
>>> What I’m wondering is: When did Americans start putting two ells in
>> “canceled” and “canceling”?  I am well aware that two ells are preferred in
>> British spellings, and that “cancellation” with two ells has been long
>> preferred on both sides of the pond; for some reason Americans seem to be
>> adopting British practice for the other forms as well.
>>> 
>>> I can’t tell you how many times I have looked up home pages of people
>> who post on Facebook, wondering they are Canadian, Indian or Australian,
>> only to find they are Americans who just use the spellings favoured (sic)
>> elsewhere.
>>> 
>>> I expect they will soon start wasting ells on “levelled/levelling”,
>> “bevelled/bevelling“, “travelled/travelling”, “pencilled/pencilling”,
>> “parcelled/parcelling”,
>>> “carolled/carolling”,”devilled/devilling”, “cavilled/cavilling”  et al.
>> as well?
>>> 
>>> note: or maybe they already have—in the above list, Apple spell-chequer
>> (sarcasm) did NOT flag bevelled, travelled, pencilled, or pencilling as
>> misspelled.
>>> 
>>> Why not change them all at once and be done with the dirty business?
>> (Sarcasm: And switch all our -ize suffixes to -ise, and our favorite,
>> honorable colors to “favourite honourable colours”? All those spare Us have
>> been piling up, unUsed, for centuries.)
>>> 
>>> Basically, my question is: Is there any point anymore to knowing the
>> difference between AmE and BrE spellings?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Brian Hitchcock
>>> At Large
>>> Email:  bwh031451 at gmail.com
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org