This is nit-picky and not at all important, but when viewing the properties panel for text frames in Engrave mode, the spelling of “Center tab stop” is the British “centre.” I’ve not seen any other British spelling variants in the program except for this one.
Just passin it on…
/nerd
It’s weirdly inconsistent, isn’t it?
centre is the English spelling (this is, how I learnt it over here in Europe)
center is the spelling in American English
I am confused 
Sometimes American English relates to Italian (color/colore vs. colour) or to German (simpler grammar).
It is confusing though if the application shows variants of the same thing.
And I remember a remark in the first Sibelius handbook/manual about 20 years ago - about the same issue…
I think most “American English” is either fossilized British English (things like “gotten” which the Brits abandoned a few hundred years ago) or was invented by Noah Webster - who might well have got(ten) some of his ideas from other languages, since if you look at the full editions of his early dictionaries, he was a pretty high powered linguist, aside from wanting to be different for its own sake to create a “new language” for a newly-independent nation.
An attempt was made in the 19th century to standardize English spellings to accord more with the French analogues, even at the expense of the Latinate origins.
I can’t say I approve.
IIRC the Thorndike dictionary established U.S. spellings (at least for those who used the dictionary) via a survey of most commonly used spelling.
Even then we were being manipulated by polling data.
EDIT:
Well, sources seem to indicate it was Webster who consciously wanted U.S. spellings to be “superior” to UK versions (no arroagnce there!)
Wonder where I heard the Thorndike theory.
It seems like an inaccurate version of this: Thorndike–Barnhart dictionaries | Educational, Reference, Comprehensive | Britannica
It’s kind of ironic that he finally finished his dictionary (after 26 years working on it) while spending a year in Cambridge (England, not Massachusetts).
Still, many of Webster’s ideas never made it to posterity:
“Plow” was the only one that survived, I think.
But the “anti-French” thing (or at least, anti-Spanish) isn’t quite dead yet. Some time in the last couple of days I heard a recording of an airline captain making a cabin announcement about “landing at ‘Albu-quirky’ in a few minutes.” And years ago, an American guy whose name was Jean Levesque (obviously of French origin!) introduced himself by saying “Hi, I’m John Leverskew.” 
You guys consistently win the award for most fascinating OT’s!
As far as the centre/center thing goes, the most likely explanation is that one of the dev team did it, forgetting about the convention (us Brits in software development do tend to have to type the word ‘color’ through gritted teeth, but hey ho)
It’s not my favorite spelling either, Paul 
That gave me a good chuckle, Stephan
I lived for 30 years in the USA, and accepted US spellings during that time; but now that I am back in Europe, I have reverted to English useage and it goes against the grain to see American useage imposed upon a European firm.
Please leave this odd man out as it is, to be “the exception that proves the rule” and to demonstrate that the developers are not poe-faced!
David
This has nothing to do with “imposing” American spelling conventions on anyone. That’s a bit silly. Americans and British simply have slightly different spellings, and that’s the way it is. It seems to be quite standard for these spelling deviations to be considered based on region by companies who sell software in both places.
Although as I said before, I don’t care in the least about the spelling, just bring it to their attention.
On the other hand, in seventh grade I was knocked out of a spelling bee for spelling “amphitheatre,” so perhaps some unresolved bitterness? 
I dont know who imposed it, but it is a conscious decision by someone at Steinberg to use American spellings – as it was at Sibelius, which was an English company. Those of us who reject the conceit of the USA being the self-styled leader of the free world, resent the use of USA spellings in the EU. Like Paul, I find it grates on me. That’s all.
David
It’s standard practice in software development to localize your software.
This includes variants of english.
However, what does grate is that british english is labelled as if it’s a variant, when actually it’s the Americans that varied. The rest of the english-speaking world is still pretty much in agreement. So my suggestion is to label the languages as English, and American.
What really grates is when the USA tries to teach Brits what “British English” really is - for example the nonsense in Microsoft’s first attempts at a British English spelling checker, which didn’t look anything like the Oxford English Dictionary’s version of British English. For example, aside from a few exceptional words, the idea that “-ize” is American English spelling and “-ise” is British English is just plain wrong. “-ize” has been used in British English for hundreds of years.
In my day we used Logic for notation, and the manual dropped into German in the middle of sentences. This is nothing.
Don’t you mean “and the manual in the middle of sentences into German dropped”?
