For more than 20 years as a journalist and editor in Australia I worked hard to purge myself of the Americanisms that sometimes crept into my work. I was eager to adapt not only to Aussie English, but to the metric system as well.
In the beginning I was perhaps a bit too eager: as a junior sub-editor at The Canberra Times I once converted nautical miles to nautical kilometres. The check sub leaned over to me and said gravely, 'Nautical miles are nautical miles.'
Now, when I’m finally starting to get the hang of it, I find myself living again for a while in my native US, and for the first time in more than two decades, doing some freelance editing here — for Yale University.
It’s a bit like learning to drive a car on the right (that is, the wrong) side of the road again. Years ago I learned to drive on the right side, then moved to Australia where I had to learn how to drive on the left side. Since then I’ve been back and forth between the two countries many times, and have become reasonably proficient in switching driving styles.
But I’m not sure it will be that easy to make the switch in my editing. Once-familiar American spellings and abbreviations now seem foreign to me. I’m so used to dropping the periods (sorry, full stops) from 'US', for example, that U.S. looks a little too busy. And years of reading 'per cent' as two words have made me want to pull out my blue pencil every time I see it here as one, 'percent'.
In my first US editing job I had to constantly remind myself, as I did when I first began driving in Australia, just which side of the language I was supposed to be on. All those years in Australia of coming to terms with '-re' and '-our' suffixes have made finding the 'center' of an American document more 'labor-intensive' than it used to be.
And then there is the problem of '-ise' and 'ize'. It’s taking a while to reacclimatise/reacclimatize to that one. At least they’re pronounced the same in both countries, unlike some words. (If you’re shopping for basil here, ask for 'bayzil', not 'bazzle'.)
By the time I’d made my way through the first edit of a document here my head was spinning between the two hemispheres and