Originally published in On Our Selection News July 18, 2013

I’m a little wound up.

I’m worried about the Australian way of spelling – not the Australian way of life, but of spelling. You see, I’ve just typed the word “colour” into a Microsoft Word document, and there is a ghastly red squiggly line mocking me with its indication that I’ve spelt this word incorrectly. I thought I was writing what the Concise Oxford Dictionary describes as “a sensation produced on eyes by rays of light when resolved as by prism into different wavelengths,” but as far as Microsoft Word is concerned, I’ve just written incorrect dribble. It’s as though I’ve just smashed my head against the keyboard and tried to pass of the random combination of letters I’d hit with my face as a word.

What’s even more infuriating is when I’m sending a test from my smart phone and I use the word “colour”. This time, I don’t even get the courtesy of a rue red line – my word has automatically been bastardised to conform with the American spelling system. This means I then has to go back and correct the correction that the rude person called “AutoCorrect” corrected automatically without asking. Sometimes AutoCorrect is not only rude, but stubborn and won’t back down without a fight. Sometimes I have to go back three or four times to un-Americanise a word – it’s very impolite.

Cast your eyes upon this: color. It looks wrong, doesn’t it? I just tried to read it phonetically, and I said “coal ore”, which sounds more like something that will eventually kill all the nice polar bears (because apparently climate change only affects the polar bears) as opposed to something that can brighten a room. I’ll admit that phonetically, “colour” isn’t exactly the correct combination of letters, but it is nice on the eye.

I know it’s wildly ethnocentric (judging one’s culture based on the assumption that your own is correct or normal – thanks commu degree!) but I think we have a right to retain our signature, even if we did snag it from the motherland.

That is not just about “colour”, or the absence of a “u” here and there, it’s the fact that the youngsters of our nation may not recognise the difference between Australian English and American English. This is because we are in increasingly digital society – we spend a lot of time on computers and on our phones. This isn’t really a problem, in fact it’s quite brilliant, but it does have its downsides besides the cheeky repetitive strain injuries and obesity it is credit with causing. A problem is that the companies that make these devices we love so dearly (myself included), are American and so the default spelling setting on these devices are set to American English.

This wouldn’t be such a bad problem if it wasn’t fro autocorrect and spellcheck. They are both excellent idea, and have saved many a mark for correct spelling and provided plenty of laughs when they are slightly off the mark. But these tools are telling the user that the word they are actually spelling correctly, say “colour” for instance, is spelt wrong.

Look, Australian kids these days are very busy people. They have lapping to do, they have sandwiches to throw and YOLO hashtagging to do. I worry that in between these activities they won’t have time to go back and correct their auto-correct’s automatically American tendency. I understand that language is fluid and changes with time. Things change and I get that. But I feel like we need to hang on to our apparently unnecessary “U” or our curvy “S” in the place of cold, heartless and pointy “Z” in words like “realise”.

The world is heading to globalisation where languages will be shared and we will skip and dance merrily under rainbows with major trade deals, but that day is not today.

Show your true colours Australia, that’s why I love U. Because “colour” is beautiful like a rainbow.