Gray’s Anatomy, on the other hand, has another myth associated with it. They say that it is a “cursed” book. Mr. Gray dissected his mother’s body and wrote. Utter bullshit I’m guessing

I passed anatomy because of Mr. Gray!!! Yehaw!

The -t ending makes sense. Of course, pretty much everything else in that list survived. Although (see what I did there) had a renaissance/resurrection as ‘altho’ with the internet and it’s wacky abbreviations/shortenings.

As for grey/gray you are again correct. As Canadians, we should be on the grey side of the aisle. Which I am actually. Gray generally looks funny to me.

Although, I’ve recently discovered that early Americans trying to be different for the sake of nation-building wasn’t as black and white as I thought (grey). Apparently the spelling changes introduced by the nationalistic board weren’t all that popular and only a few stuck. So really, the differences in language are better explained as American English not taking on any new developments in British English since… well, since then.

Thank goodness the word-list didn’t take completely. Check out some of the original suggestions from Wikipedia:

The Board’s initial list of 300 words was published on April 1, 1906. Much of the list included words ending with -ed changed to end -t (“addressed”, “caressed”, “missed”, “possessed” and “wished”, becoming “addresst”, “carest”, “mist”, “possest” and “wisht”, respectively). Other changes included removal of silent letters (“catalogue” to “catalog”), changing -re endings to -er (“calibre” and “sabre” to “caliber” and “saber”), changing “ough” to “o” to represent the long vowel sound in the new words altho, tho and thoro, and changes to represent the “z” sound with that letter, where “s” had been used (“brasen” and “surprise” becoming “brazen” and “surprize”)

The grey/gray scheme comes from the color/colour deal. The Yanks wanted to be different from the Brits so they changed up dozens/hundreds of words. (Or so I’ve been led to believe)

Who knows, maybe I’ll even make it to Missassauga one of these days.