by Darlene Goodrick, Supervisor – Printing & Duplicating, Vancouver Island University

Have you ever been involved in a debate on how to correctly spell the word ‘colour’?  Ever wonder why British English spells ‘color’ with a ‘u’ and the American English does not?

What about us in Canada?  I remember when my daughter was in grade three and her teacher included this word in the weekly spelling words.  After the test there was much crying because my straight A student got a wrong answer.

However this straight A student was also a great debater, and brought it to my attention that in fact it was not her that was wrong, but her teacher.  The teacher was teaching the spelling to be ‘color’ but we live in Canada and fall under the British spelling of the word, so ‘colour’ must be marked correct as well.

Upon visiting said teacher, and after much discussion, the teacher recognized we had a point and my daughter’s record was set straight.  That daughter went on to win a Governor General’s award!

We work with the Microsoft Office Suite which is an American product, so the ‘spell check’ may tell you your word is spelled incorrectly until you train your system by using the ‘add to dictionary’ feature.

Working in the print shop where we deal with a lot of colour, I thought this was an interesting topic for this week’s blog post.  The history of the word and how it has evolved is quite fascinating.

If you are looking for more colour in your life, stop by the print shop and see what we have to offer.  The cost of running a print job on color paper with black print is a huge savings over running color copies!