Brit-picking: vital or a waste of time?

[emmagrant01]

jedirita and I discussed this topic over lunch yesterday, and it pops up on LJ constantly. I've never given it much thought, honestly, because everyone who's ever called me for an Americanism has been extraordinarily nice about it. The culture in the HP fandom seems to be that writers should use British English whenever possible, and I'll admit that I've bought into that 100%. I always looked at it as a respect-for-canon issue.

Rita feels differently, though, as do a lot of other people. So I started thinking about it, and now I'm questioning my sudden zeal to make sure my HP fic is as Americanism-free as possible. Can I really accomplish that? And is it really a worthwhile goal, considering there are so many other more important things to work on as a writer?

I'll keep this brief because so many people have already said something about this at some point. I'm still forming my thoughts, and I won't bore you with anything half-assed, for once! ;-)

For now, I'll just point to this post by lykaios, and say. "Yeah. What she said."

Comments

britsh/american english

[lady81bird.livejournal.com]

Just adding my own bystander wievpoint two knuts to the general discussion - I'm not british or american (I think rather a big part of the fandom is not either, HP's been translated into how many languages by now?), english is my third language, I learnt it from class, books and TV. I'm really not that good at saying what's British English or what's American English (actually I've honestly never bothered to learn the difference, english is english and if I understand what's written it's good enough for me). So the noise about americanisms and only using British English seems, well, rather funny and hysteric.
I hope I didn't offend anybody (but I think that if somebody said to me they think Estonian and Finnish are the same I'd probably be hysterical too - hysterically laughing, that is).
Best wishes to you Emma Grant and thanks for the wonderful fics you write.
LadyBird