You say WHAT?

Ah, the many joys of living with Americans. One of the weirdest things is a gradual americanisation of my vocabulary, which tends to blurt out in bits and pieces and leaves me feeling ashamed and nationally insecure.

Echoing some of Rich's post, I'd like to illuminate you on the origin of the aluminum/aluminium debate, again the information comes from Bill Bryson, but this time his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is well worth a read.

William Davy, a brilliant young British (naturally) scientist is busy discovering elements such as potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium and strontium. In 1808 Davy isolated a new element and called it alumium. For some reason he thought better of that and changed it to aluminum four years later. Americans dutifully adopted the new term, but many british uers disliked aluminum, pointing out that it disrupted the -ium pattern established by sodium, calcium and strontium, so they added a vowel and a syllable.

This is the origin of the debate. Who has the moral high ground? I just don't know...