>We USers pare down the spelling. All the other natives love those extra letters. But you knew that. You were just kidding, right?
What do you mean, AnnaS?! I thought it had been made manifest that I have no sense of humo(u)r.
but seriously, here comes the serious part, when I was a lad (lo these many years ago), we learned a "rule" to help us spell inflected forms. The rule went something like this: "double a consonant after a vowel". so 'big' became 'bigger' and 'kid' became 'kidding' and so on. but who decided that marvel could become marvelous and travel could become traveling? Was this just editors saving typeface? (There was period when I noticed <cringing> "employe" used consistently in employee newsletters.)
