And what, make I ask, is wrang with 'bigly', forbye?
And THAT spelling of 'colour' all comes down that lout, Dr Samuel Johnson and his monomania;
'colour' is NOT derived from the French 'couleur'' but from the Latin 'color': I have a facsimile of Webster's original dictionary,
and his introduction makes a better case for American spellings than old Johnson (who made no case beyond 'I say so').
Johnson, similarly introduced an 'L' into sodger ('soldier') because he, wrongly, thought it had come into English from the French 'soldat',
when it had come directly from Latin (later ignoramuses who knew nothing of etymology started pronouncing the 'L' that Johnson
had bunged in there).
The same goes for 'could' because Johnson drew analogies with 'would' and 'should'.
'Would' comes from 'will', 'should' comes from 'shall', but 'could' does most definitely NOT come from 'call'.
All that Johnson really did, however innovative his dictionary supposedly was, was show that he knew very little about that which he supposedly knew so much: and burden the users of 'British' English with a whole load of daft spellings. He also made some fairly off-colour (or, off-color) remarks about the Scots: probably having already proven what a coarse, unmannerly bloke he was during his trip up North.
A silly Professor of English tried to tell me there was no vocable 'breadth' the other day . . . I told them that they should bend their gully lugs a bit mair to the spoken language.
Oh, and while I'm here, William Shagspeer spelt his name in a fairly large number of ways: didn't stop him from writing some
mind blowingly good plays! I bet he wouldn't have given a tuppenny toss anent which way one spelt 'color/colour/culler'.
So: accidently or accidentally: you can be sure with me, at least, it's always on purpose.
