Spelling is not my strong suit. My Mom will certainly agree, and acts as my personal spell check when I forget to actually use it.

Growing up as a Canadian kid, but watching American shows like Sesame Street, I learned how to spell so many things the American way.  When I was old enough to be in school, all those American spellings were quickly replaced by Canadian spellings.  Some words I just like the looks of the American way, so I didn’t care if my Canadian teachers marked them wrong, for example ‘color’ looks way nicer than ‘colour’, so I continued to spell it the way I learned on Sesame Street, being the rebel speller that I was.  I guess I have loyalties both ways because I continue to spell  ’cheque’ this way, not ‘check’.

I’ve lived in USA for 14 years, this June 28th.  For 14 years now I continue to get the infamous wavy red line under  my words.  Partly because, well, I’m not a strong speller, partly because I type faster than my brain can handle, and mostly because my blog, my texts, my facebook, etc don’t like my Canadian way of spelling things.

Good ol’ Noah Webster  ‘Americanized’ the spelling of many words, in the 1800′s.   And the ironic thing about all this Canadian vs American spelling is that my name is now Webster,  since I married an American.   You can see a list of the most common words that have dual spelling here.