How's the world from your point of view? Mine's not so bad. I met up with a guy recently with quite the car collection. He currently has over a dozen cars on his property all at various states of disrepair. He wants to try to fix some of them up come spring so he can sell them and make room for new ones he'd rather have. I asked if he'd want a second pair of hands at all, to help him out. He said he's open to it. I hope this goes somewhere.
I know the feeling. So let me ask you? Why does "American" English and "British" English have such different spellings for so many words? I used to think it was because when Webster published his dictionary he established his own reformulation according to pronunciation. But Wikipedia quotes John Algeo as saying "He was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in America, but he did not originate them."
differences in dictionary spellings, mostly webster's used "-or" at the end of words, johnson's used "-our" (honor, honour) metathesis got codified in american english but not british english, thus "-er" instead of "-re" (saber, sabre) sometimes from orthographical simplification in american english, such as logue > log (catalog, analog) or æ and œ > e so really all sorts of reasons
see, the source of -or/-our words are mostly from latin, right when they were originally borrowed from latin, the ending was spelled -or. when the normans invaded england, they brought the -our ending that old french had for them with them. that ending was applied to old borrowings as well. so really you can blame the original problem on the french. after the british stopped aping the french they reborrowed more terms from latin, but there was confusion as to whether those words should be spelled with -or or -our: the general consensus was for -or, but still not a decided thing. webster's just used -or for everything on the basis of that being the original spelling. johnson's used -our in the french-gotten cases.
Do you think there was a strong cultural motivation to try to distinguish or establish America independently from England or more of a natural process?
no i don't think that at all - this sort of thing happens naturally. i don't think anybody in the united states aimed to make their spellings different than the british.
What's the most fascinating thing you know about language or linguistics?
that's a hard question to answer because i find it all really fascinating. i don't think i could call anything "the most fascinating". i really recommend anybody reading to learn more about linguistics. i wouldn't call it useful knowledge all the time, but i think it's all interesting knowledge.