It started as a simple question on IRC; "is the correct spelling anonymizer or anonymiser"? A simple question, but one that set me a-pondering.
Conventional wisdom, of course, dictates that if you're in the States or its hegemony, you use the z; if you're not, you use the s. But it's not really that simple. The OED, for example, has long championed the use of '-ize', much to the chagrin of many (your humble servant included). I'm not entirely clear on the reason for this antipathy towards the US' preferred spelling, even my own. It's tempting to put it down to a latent anti-Americanism, but for an Irish lad such as I there are 800 years' worth of reasons to be more anti-British than anti-American. Actually, I have my own thoughts on this matter, but to go into them here would be to drive this tract, already off-course, veering off the edge of the Cliffs of On-Topic.
To get back to the point, then: is there a correct spelling for "anonymiser"? The word itself is one of those that's come into its own on the internet. It doubtless existed long before the TCP/IP protocols were even a gleam in some nerd's eye, but these days it's a word that's definitely internet-related and, no doubt, one that will enjoy more and more currency as time goes by. As such, the question of whether it has an "official" spelling becomes a little more fraught.
It's tempting to dismiss the question as academic, but I don't think it is. Linguae francae (if that is indeed the plural) traditionally came about to facilitate spoken communication, and intricacies of spelling mattered little. However, none of those languages had to deal with search engines.
Take, for example, a simple phrase; "colour blind". Searching google for "color blind" without the quotes brings a lot of American pages, as one would expect. Changing that to "color blind uk" (again without the quotes) leads one to a BBC story where colour is spelt, ahem, properly. But by putting the phrase "color blind" in quotes leaves one once again with only US results, irrespective of whether the "uk" is appended outside the quotes.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to have opted for a US spelling on occasion when searching google. Indeed, there've been times when I've added metatags to web pages that included both US and UK spelling. This behaviour is necessary at the moment but, I humbly suggest, doomed to extinction. It's just too cumbersome.
So what's going to happen in the future? It's possible that as search algorithms get smarter, the problem will disappear, but I don't think that's likely. However much google et al try to deal with the problem, I suspect that it'll always be easier for those of us who write stuff with search engines in mind will either adopt the US spelling, or include US-friendly spelling in tags, keywords, etc. Whether this means that the internet's lingua franca will move from English in general to American English in the specific, I can't say for sure (obviously), but I think that there is a good chance.
Of course, this all assumes that we won't all be searching in Simplified Chinese in ten years' time.
No comments:
Post a Comment