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RSSWorshiping and Kidnapping
The recent post on when to double the L when adding an ending to words like cancel prompted this question from David:
What about the “p” in worship. Is it “worshiping” or “worshipping”?
Like cancel, the word worship gets different treatment in British and American usage:
British usage: worship, worshipped, worshipping
American usage: worship, worshiped, worshiping
This difference applies to most spellings of this sort, but not all.
For example, take the spellings kidnapped and kidnapping.
According to what we’ve been saying about British and American usage, “kidnaping” ought to be the preferred American spelling, but it isn’t.
Merriam-Webster does acknowledge the single p spelling, but gives kidnapping first. In the case of cancel and worship, the single consonant spellings are given first and the double letter spellings are the variants.
According to the Chicago Manual of Style, when Merriam-Webster follows one spelling with a “variant,” the first spelling is the one to use.
When I typed “kidnaping” into my American version of Microsoft Word, the software immediately changed it to kidnapping.
Spelling rules are useful guides, but they do not and cannot apply to every word.
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One of the ‘rules’ we are taught in our early years of school in the UK is that when a vowel is followed by a consenent, a further vowel softens the first vowel.
So, by this, Worshiping, would become Wer-shipe-ing.
Not sure what the validity of this rule is, i.e. whether it was made up by teachers to make our odd rules easier to understand, but that is how I learned it anyway.
I always prefer to stick to the British version of spellings, like colour instead of color(US) and labour instead of labor (US) …it is really funny when you grow up with one set of spells and then suddenly they shows as null around..
i’ve settled on the rule of thumb that i double final consonants only when the root word is monosyllabic. ‘kidnap’ is a compound word, so it makes sense to double the ‘p’. but is this rule consistent?
does it really matter b/c everyone has their own way of speaking, writing, and thinking and the languages and “right” ways of spelling our only set up and there… truely their is no wrong or right way to spell because everyhitng was just though up by someone eles… such as books are thoughup by theirs writers…
It does matter to an extent because there is no such thing as “private” language. It is because we let grammar and spelling slide that language these days are almost unrecognizable in some cases. For example, your sentence “such as books are thoughup by theirs writers…” does not make sense and will not make sense to anyone who cannot tell that you were trying to say “such as books are THOUGHT UP by THEIR writers…” Without rules, there will not be a structure to follow and people won’t be able to learn the language.