Words in the wrong context

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

At what point does a local peculiarity become a legitimate regional dialect? And when or how does this become dominant?
For example, of course the correct spelling of words like colour and flavour involve the letter "u" ( ) but our American friends had to save ink (something about rationing during the war of independence, I think) and left the "u" out, to the point that this is now the (statistically) prevalent form. How many people need to agree on a non-standard usage or spelling for it to become an "accepted" variant? And then the "standard" form?

The question on what spelling variants are included in the dictionary largely depends on the publishers of those dictionaries. These dictionary publishers tend to be conservative, so even a widespread misspelling would not generally make it into the dictionary.

For example, "embarrassed" is the dictionary-standard spelling. However, on the Web, it is not the most common spelling. The most common Web spelling is "embarassed" (one r, not two). Yet the dictionary makers would likely not include this most widespread spelling even though it outnumbers the correct spelling on the Web by about 2 to 1.

Other words take a long time to change their spellings. "Minuscule" is the correct spelling per dictionary, but it is slowly losing out to the widespread misspelling of "miniscule". How slowly? So far it's taken over a hundred years and "minuscule" is still the standard spelling.

"Through" is similarly entrenched against "thru". Even though "thru" was in acceptable use as a variant spelling when Johnson released the first edition of his dictionary in the 18th century, he chose to prefer the archaic "through" and that is what we have used ever since.

English spellings tend not to change because the spellings of English work a bit like this:
* The people use dictionaries to look up spellings
* Dictionaries record common usage
* Common usage comes from the people

This mechanism is similar to:
* Rock beats scissors
* Scissors beats paper
* Paper beats rock