Re-learning how to spell

September 14th, 2010



I have been away from the university for about three weeks and out of the country for about 2 weeks (we had 2 weeks of university recess and I took an extra week for Jen's PR wedding) and it feels more like three months. Just four weeks ago, I was feeling intune with kiwi ways and life but I'm now back in NZ struggling to understand the kiwi accent and desperately trying to recall all the cultural comforts I had aquired before I left.

I can't tell if this is just "pregnancy brain" or just incomplete acculturation...either way I am still not kiwi-fied.

The perfect example of such an occurrence happened yesterday.

My university password had expired during the break so I called the IT help desk to get it reactivated. The helpful women promised to get it sorted in a less then 2 minutes. She asked me what my favorite hobby was and I quickly answered "travel!" She told me that she had temporarily changed my password to traveling. "Easy enough" I agreed and hung up the phone. I logged back on and typed in traveling...ERROR. I took my time to type in again...ERROR. I called the help desk again and luckily got the say women. I told her I was being denied access even with the new password. I read to hear the error message and she asked me to retype the password making sure the cap lock was off...CHECK. Then she asked me to type the word in all lower case letters...CHECK. Right before I press "ok," I her spelling out the word letter by letter and realize my mistake...I forgot that I was in NZ...which means traveling is spelled TRAVELLING...TWO Ls...darn! I quickly fixed my "misspelling," pressed Ok and finally logged onto my computer. Too embarrassed to admit it, I acted surprised and bewildered that all of a sudden the password worked.

I hung up the phone and laughed.

I don't know if its complete laziness on my behalf or implicit resistance but I do not use English NZ (british) spelling in my PowerPoints...actually its a combination of both most of the time. It takes a few seconds for me to realize (if I realize at all) that I should have spelled "realize" as realise or spell color as "colour" instead. At times, I just don't allow myself to think about spelling it any other way. For example the word "Colonization." A professor came into my class during the end of my lecture and commented on my spelling of colonization with a "z." I laughed and explained that I was from the states and he smirked and said "I know."

I guess its a bit Americo-centered of me... but I just can't spell colonization with an "s"...I am not sure how to explain it but using the "s" seems to soften the word in my eyes and I'm just not down with it. Ok maybe I'm being a little melodramatic but there is something I have internalized about letters and phonetics and thier hard/soft connotations...I'm down for some cultural linguistic analysis of it all but till then Colonization stays with a "z."