Spelling

I recently submitted an application for a fellowship. The proposal had to be written in Australian English. Which seems to be more similar to English English than to US English. For example, you switch all words ending in ize to end in ise. Except those that are mostly ize, or those that aren't. Organise, recognise, size, wise.

And add extra u's to certain words. Colour, favour, neighbourhood.

I got feedback from an external grant review company on my proposal, and I sure hope the school didn't pay a lot of money for that, because it was pretty worthless. One comment they made was that I needed to be consistent with my spelling. I had to take care not to leave all those American-spelled words hanging around. I didn't realise there were any left. So I ran a search and there was one lone organize left instead of organise, and everything else was Australian.

And meanwhile, after spending a page (out of only eight) describing this really cool 150 year old problem that I was going to investigate, and why it was such an interesting problem, and how it had withstood attempts to solve it for 150 years, and why that mattered, their feedback was, yeah but why is it interesting? Maybe if you explained how it might be applicable to biology it might be interesting. Meanwhile, it's just a blah proposal. I looked up the backgrounds of those on the review company, and yup. They're biologists. No, the ones doing the actual reviewing of the proposals will not be biologists. So their feedback was totally useless.

That has nothing to do with the title of this post, which is spelling.

I have decided to convert all my spelling to Australian, and also my pronunciation of a few key words. Such as the letter Z. In Australia, that is pronounced "zed". I kind of like "zed" over "zee", because "zee" is too close to "see", and sometimes it's confusing as to whether you mean Z or C. No confusion with "zed." So I'm calling it zed. Or I try to. I catch myself saying "zee" all the time. Today, explaining something to a student, I called it "zed" and then "zed" again and then in the middle of a sentence in which I had just called it "zed," I suddenly forgot and called it "zee" all over again.

I'm trying so hard to switch spelling and pronunciation that I have forgotten completely how to spell. Totally inconsistent. I have to stare at a board for a while, then ask my students, wait, did I spell that right? And they all laugh and say no.

Thank goodness it's just a few spelling words here, rather than an entire language. I can only handle one major life change at a time.