Re: British or American spelling in IETF docs

--On Monday, August 17, 2026 10:27 -0500 Jean Mahoney
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> On 8/14/26 9:15 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> --On Friday, August 14, 2026 19:51 +1200 Brian E Carpenter
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 14-Aug-26 19:24, [email protected] wrote:
>>>> Exactly, enforcing one spelling will lower the work
>>> 
>>> I don't think so. I can't write fluently in American; there are
>>> numerous spelling issues, and many more subtle issues. The word
>>> "gotten" for example really doesn't exist in British except in the
>>> phrase "ill-gotten gains", and in British one must write "a couple
>>> of bytes" whereas apparently in American it's acceptable to write
>>> "a couple bytes". Bottom line: I would produce text more slowly if
>>> asked to write in American, and it would need copy-editing anyway.
>> 
>> Brian,
>> 
>> I think your comment illustrates the problem with trying to make
>> specific rules about this.  In the American English I was taught,
>> "a couple bytes" isn't "American English", it is illiterate, just
>> as in British English.  Since there is no official, unified, style
>> manual for American English, it could also be regional variation.
>> For the RFC Series, that, at least historically, illustrates the
>> real rule, which has traditionally been a bit more flexible,
>> especially for phrase constructions rather than spelling, than
>> what several of us, including, as Jean reported, the Style Manual,
>> have been saying.
>> 
>> I hope to hear from Jean if what I'm about to say is not current
>> practice but, traditionally, if a construction like "a couple
>> bytes" showed up in an I-D the RPC or its predecessors were
>> processing, one of three things would happen:
>> 
>>   (i) They would contact the author(s) and ask if that was what
>> 	was really intended.
>>   (ii) They would change it and see if the author(s) objected
>> 	on AUTH48.
> 
> [JM] As "a couple bytes" reads as a typo, the RPC would add "of"
> between "couple" and "bytes" but not call the edit out.  However,
> the edit would be shown in the diff file that the authors should
> review during Final Review.

And, of course, reading it as a typo, rather than as an Americanism,
is consistent with both parts of what I said to Brian -- both the
"not standard practice on this side of pond" part and the "hard to
get this right if we go down the path toward more specific rules"
part.

   john