The centre of it all

Hey, I'm late.

I also still have a bit of a headache, and since my father didn't have any root beer in the cold room (the cold room is, in fact, just what it sounds like. Think of it as a root cellar without the cellar part) I'm stuck drinking citrus fizz. Now, citrus fizz is fine and all that, but when you have a headache and your heart was sort of set on root beer, it's all a little disappointing.

Anyway.

I'm going to try to keep it short today (have you ever noticed that I rarely do when I say that?), but I do have something to say about centre.

No, not Toronto. That'd be the centre of the universe, not just centre. I mean the word centre.

I've discovered that I have a fairly odd visceral reaction to the word centre. Not because of its meaning or because I'm not exactly centred myself, but because of the spelling.

Centre, you see, is one of those weird Canadian things. You'll notice (especially if you're American) that I've been spelling the word centre rather than center. Here in Canada that tends to be a personal choice. Centre and center exist side by side, occasionally eyeing each other to figure out if they're actually the same word.

They are. Metre and meter aren't the same word, but as far as I know centre and center don't differ at all except for that switched-up r and e. Those of us who favour British spellings (notice the favour there? Yeah, I'm all about adding extra u's whenever possible) tend towards centre, while those who don't will use center instead.

Why, then, did I find myself cringing (as I always do) as I drove into town and passed the Moose Lodge's Family Center on the highway? There's nothing wrong with it being a center. There are plenty of other centers in the area.

They all bug me.

It's even hard for me to type center. Erm... admittedly, that's nothing but old habit though. When I think of typing centre, the letters always want to come out in the same order that I generally use them in.

As opposed to when I type the, which at least a third of the time seems to come out as teh. Why is that?





Um, sorry. Back to topic.

Centre is somewhat of a polarising thing around here. I work at a nature centre (not center), and our related historic site has an interpretive centre (not center). A few years ago we had a staff member there who constantly spelled it center on her posters and other advertising, and we constantly had to correct her. She thought centre looked weird. We told her the name of the place included the word centre, not the word center.

Which, in fact, is true. In that case it really was part of the name of the building. It'd be like taking my own personal name -- which has tons of variant spellings (yes. That's right. You wouldn't believe how many different ways you can spell Dee...) -- and deciding to spell it another way rather than the way it's properly spelled just because you happen to like the other spelling better.

So why do I get annoyed by the Family Center and its relatives? I'm not sure, really. I can accept the whole that's its NAME argument in theory, but in practice I'm always going to be thinking why the h-e-double-hockey-sticks did they choose THAT spelling???

It's like it's... un-Canadian.

Which in itself is funny because it's not even Canadian to begin with.

And can anyone tell me why we've kept so many British spellings and yet we call tyres tires?

This country confuses me sometimes.






And so much for keeping this short. Can I predict 'em, or can I predict 'em?