I’m fascinated by the minute spelling differences between American English and British.

For instance, on the front of the bulletins we hand out at church, it says, “Thank you for worshipping with us today.” A month or two ago, Father brought them to me and asked me to change it to “worshiping.” Brits use 2 p’s; Americans prefer 1.

Or do we?

Between us, I think 2 p’s makes more sense. The “i” is short, so we should double the consonant. Worshiping looks like the root word should “worshipe”. Yeah, no, not a fan.

Then there’s the whinge-whine connection. Brits whinge; Americans whine. In this instance, the words have slightly different meanings. Whinge means “complain persistently and in a peevish or irritating way,” but whine is the actual noise — that high-pitched complaining cry.

So when today’s word for JusJoJan was “pernickety” — whereas I only knew the word “persnickety” — I should have guessed that it was the old Brit-American issue. They both mean a fussy, particular attention to detail. But British English is the older spelling. Americans had to go and change it.

Why? Usually Americans are dropping letters, like the whole worshipping thing. In the case of persnickety, they added a letter!

I like that we dropped that unnecessary ‘u’ from words like color and neighbor. Shorter, more practical, good.

Then there’s biscuit vs cookie, or football vs soccer, torch vs flashlight. (Seriously – a torch has fire leaping from it, right? If a flashlight is a torch, what’s a torch called?)

How about you? What words do you notice that are different?