u/Original-Ingenuity41

Growing up in South Africa, it never occurred to me that there was any other way to spell English, than the UK version.

It's now painfully obvious to anyone living outside of the USA that there are TWO major spelling conventions in English - UK spelling and US spelling. (With more local variants, but these are the main ones).

I’m very glad that in SA we broke apartheid, not so glad that the democratic government the people voted for, and who promised ‘a better life for all,’ has failed so abysmally.

The ANC was great at destroying apartheid, but an unmitigated disaster when it came to actually running the country:

• 80% of Grade 4 pupils can't read for meaning in any language.

• The public health system is chronically understaffed, underfunded and plagued by medicine and equipment shortages.

• Eskom's (national power utility) load-shedding was caused by deferred maintenance, corrupt coal supply contracts and skills flight after aggressive affirmative action staffing changes hollowed out engineering expertise.

• Water infrastructure is failing nationally — Johannesburg faces recurring supply crises from poor maintenance and corrupt water delivery contracts.

• Municipal collapse is widespread: most municipalities receive qualified or adverse audits year after year; sewage that spills into rivers and coastlines is now routine.

• Rail and port infrastructure has deteriorated so badly they've become a direct drag on mining and export competitiveness.

So now I live where English is not a first language. German is.

But it constantly sticks in my throat that I am forced to speak and spell American, when my actual mother tongue is English.

There’s a difference.

Yes, I know America’s GDP (never a great benchmark, but it is what it is) sits at around $32.4 trillion. They’re still the world’s largest economy (Trump notwithstanding). (By comparison, SA sits down at around 40th globally with a GDP of about $450 billion, and Germany, where I now live, is at $4.7 trillion, Europe’s largest economy.)

So I get it. Most of the tech we use in our daily lives is American. Google, Apple. Chat GPT, Claude, MS Word & Excel, Adobe Premiere and Photoshop. Time and again, the default spelling on all this tech is US English.

Ghost, a writers’ portal I was considering, doesn’t even offer an alternative. It’s US English or nothing. So I’m opting for an EU based platform instead.

So, based on this frustration, here's an open letter to American tech owners:

Dear American Tech Owners,

I’m glad you had a wonderful 4th of July. Whoop de doo. Your President in his speech, even managed, for 40 painful minutes, not to shoot himself in both feet. Which in itself is an achievement.

But here’s the thing. Outside of what is becoming progressively less ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave,’ we speak English.

Not American.

You're obviously unaware that we don't actually consider American to be English. It's more of a colonial creole.

We have pavements and jerseys and squash. You have sidewalks and sweaters and racketball. We say organise. You say organize. We say colour. You say color.

The entire British Commonwealth (with the exception of Canada [42 million people], where it's a bit of a mix and match, although after your President threatened to annex them, that may soon change) is taught, writes, reads, speaks and communicates using UK English spelling.

Think India (1.45bn), Pakistan (251m), Nigeria (232m), Bangladesh (173m), Tanzania (68m), South Africa (66m), Kenya, (58m), Uganda (50m), Malaysia (34m), Australia (28m), Ghana (34m), Cameroon (29m)... you want me to go on?

Not millions. That's BILLIONS of English-speaking people - many times more than the 349m who live in the USA - who don't speak American.

We speak ENGLISH.

Even here in the EU where English is taught as a second language, they teach UK English, not American.

The British invented the language for goodness sake. At least pay us, living outside of the USA, the respect of allowing us to use it in the original lexicon.

Please fix the language settings on your software, or consider the Commonwealth market a grumpy place where we will now actively try to develop alternative technologies and platforms that are less USA dependent.

Oh, and the same applies to your text-to-speech and AI voice software.

It is profoundly irritating to have one's sat-nav, AI and God knows what other software talking to one in American instead of English, as a default. Often without providing alternatives.

Have you ANY idea of the huge difference in cultural signalling, between a voice speaking in British RP (received pronunciation), compared to, for example a nice broad Yorkshire or Glasgow accent? A Jamaican accent, compared to a South African one?

Hearing English in the accent of your homeland feels warm and friendly.

Being forced to listen to an American twang feels… alienating and downright rude.

We English speakers who live outside of your country, are a polyglot of humans who just want to get on with the increasingly difficult task of living.

We have different forms of English. Different slang. But we share a common heritage and a beloved tongue that is one of the most expressive and widely used on the planet.

So stop forcing yours down our throats.

On this Independence Day, at least have the humility to accept that there is a big wide world outside of your borders.

One that is probably quite important if you, if you don’t want us to find the first viable alternative tech, where our culture and language is at least respected and honoured.

Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.

A grumpy South African English German grandpa.

In January 1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein anonymously. It received mixed reviews, selling barely 500 copies.

In later years Mary was persuaded to relinquish copyright, for which she received £30. That was the last money she ever saw from the book.

It must have been harrowing for her to compare Frankenstein’s sales with Byron’s Childe Harold III and Manfred. They sold in their thousands. Byron’s publisher paid him a total of £1,195 - in today’s money, about €150,000.

Today, Childe Harold is read almost exclusively by Byron scholars. Manfred is barely read at all.

Frankenstein has never been out of print. It has generated more film adaptations than almost any other novel in English. It sits at the foundation of science fiction as a genre, of bioethics as a discourse, of feminist literary criticism. The creature is one of the most recognisable figures in Western culture.

The book that history remembers was written by an eighteen year old girl who sat quietly on the sidelines listening to Shelley and Byron hold forth at Villa Diodati in Geneva, who was given no credit at publication, and who never derived an income from it.

Earlier, there was a similar reaction to Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Now it's acknowledged as one of the finest collections of Romantic verse in the English language.

Incredible how we get it so abysmally wrong, and then history has to correct the error. And the writers get bugger all.

Fame. Posthumously. But that's it.

(Ok Wordsworth did become Poet Laureate, but he never derived a meaningful income from his work)

I'm writing a book about the Romantics and someone posted that they didn't agree with my latest article about Shelley and Byron because I pointed out what unmitigated train-wrecks they were in their personal lives - abandoned children, abandoned mistresses, abandoned ex-wives (who commit suicide)... it goes on.

So they said, 'ah you're going all cancel culture on Shelley and Byron'.

No. It just means I can't really read their poems in the same light anymore.

Doesn't mean I won't read them. Maybe with gritted teeth. But I'm not going to ban them from the bookshelves simply because they were destructive bastards to the people in their lives.

But it did make me think about the purpose of humanities at universities.

The core tenet of a humanities degree is to educate the person, not to prepare someone for for a job.

And it should never be about shoe-horning someone into an ideology. It's about equipping people to think critically, creatively and with some degree of authenticity and innovation.

Wilhelm von Humboldt had this concept he called Bildung. He figured that since certain concepts couldn't be grasped sufficiently well in German, all students should also learn Latin and Greek. It was one of the core tenets when he founded Humboldt University in Berlin.

Then you look at the basic course Oxford and Cambidge constantly recommend as the essential foundation for life: PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics).

Not ideology only from one perspective - rather to fully understand what made Descartes and Rousseau, or Marx and Ayn Rand.

To know the extremes at both ends of the spectrum, and everything else in between. Without that, how can one even begin to apply any level of critical thinking?

I worry that Humanities courses at universities have lost that. In their haste to provide just-in-time, job-ready clones, they've forgotten what it means to be a well-rounded educated person, who at the very least can look at life through the perspective of history, of philosophy, of literature.

What are we without Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Seneca? Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kant, Adler, Jung, Freud? Without Shakespeare, Coleridge, TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas? Without Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Dickinson?

Younger people today, at - God help us - universities, walk around with a worldview they've inherited from these giants without the vaguest idea of how or why they got it.

It reminds me of that speech by Meryl Streep's character, Miranda, in The Devil Wears Prada:

"You go to your closet, and you select – I don’t know – that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

"But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets.…

"And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin.

“However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”

A humanities education should provide you not just with the ability to decide what you stand for, but with the perspective to understand where where you come from.

I'm writing an article on Byron and Shelley. I'm trying my best to be charitable, to pay homage to the talent.

But the more I learn, the harder it becomes to reconcile that talent with the destruction they left in their wake.

By any modern measure, Byron would have been diagnosed as bipolar.

The extreme mood cycles, the periods of superhuman creativity followed by paralysing depression. Reckless grandiose abandon alternating with deep self-loathing. His club foot, the shame that ran through everything.

His own letters track the swings with uncomfortable clarity.

When Lady Caroline Lamb (another jilted lover) wrote that Byron was 'mad, bad and dangerous to know’, it was meant as a warning.

The ladies of London took it as a recommendation.

But at least Byron was upfront about it. Shelley was another kettle of fish.

Shelley was the covert narcissist — all sensitivity and idealism, weeping at injustice, all the while ignoring the people he hurts.

The two women he lived with were his muses — ideals, symbols — because if he saw them as people, he'd have to find himself accountable.

Both caused substantial damage:

Byron had to leave England because his wife exposed his serial unfaithfulness not only with arbitrary men and women, but also a long incestuous affair with his half-sister.

His daughter by Claire Clairmont was cloistered away in Italy. He barely visited and made sure her mother didn't have access. Allegra died at just five.

Shelley abandoned his wife and two infant children to live with two teenagers. This started when Mary and Claire were just sixteen. His wife eventually committed suicide in the Serpentine in London.

Both Byron and Shelley drew their capacity for creation and destruction from the same fuel. Both must have been glorious and terrifying to be around.

So who should we remember more? The poets, or the men?

The more I study literary history, the more I realise how way, way stranger it is than fiction.

Byron: while he's married, he sleeps with his half-sister, sleeps with his fans (male & female), impregnates many of the female ones, and leaves such chaos in his wake, he's forced to flee the country.

Shelley: abandons his pregnant wife, and takes two sixteen-year-old girls with him across the Channel. The threesome spend weeks travelling through Europe together.

You can't make this stuff up.

On the one hand, they were unmitigated bastards.

On the other, they created some of the most soaring verse in the English language.

MUST one be an asshole to be a genius?

Do they have ANY redeeming qualities?

My chapter on the British Romantics.

People flocked from all over Germany just to sit in a bar and watch the geniuses having a beer. The first rock-star intellectuals.

Jena. Small university town.

But in the early 1800s it had more geniuses per capita that Florence during the Renaissance or Athens during the Greek golden age.

Geniuses who reshaped not just German thought, but British and American.

Women intellectuals and authors, fierce salon matriarchs who refused to be limited by the role that society demanded of them. They risked scandal and ridicule, but they did it anyway.

Men who not only broke the mould - they threw it away. They redefined our relationship with nature, the concept of the self, our relationship with our bodies and each other, literature, poetry, philosophy, ecology.

Their ideas leapt borders. Napoleon banned their books. Preachers warned about them. Governments exiled them.

They were the brightest lights of Europe, and their work outshone and outlasted all their critics.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Germaine de Staël. Alexander von Humboldt. Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt. Wilhelm and Dorothea Schlegel. August and Caroline Schlegel. Friedrich Schiller. Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Friedrich Schelling. And in their orbit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Brothers Grimm.

The English did their pilgrimages to Germany. Sat at their feet. Listened. Learned. Came back transformed.

They lit a fire under the English sensibility - shook it by the scruff of its neck and left behind some of the most searing, immortal lines of verse ever written.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. William Blake. Percy and Mary Shelley. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. John Keats. George Gordon Byron. Christina Rossetti.

Then it jumped the pond. America. The Transcendentalists had all the Germans' books on their shelves. Read and re-read until the spines broke.

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. John Muir.

It all started with a bunch of Stubbornly Optimistic Prussians:

They got it right. How are we getting it so abysmally wrong?