TFW a Canadian reminds an American that their country hasn't yet adopted American English spellings or uses both Metric and Imperial measurements.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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im gonna be honest. as a canadian (a francophone canadian, even), i think check is a more sensible spelling than cheque.
i honestly don’t understand the anglo obsession with keeping french spellings intact in english for french loanwords. these spellings (usually) make sense in french, in a way they typically don’t in english, so why not change it?
Because it's a cheque, not a check
what’s the difference? (genuinely asking, english is not my first language)
In British/commonwealth English, a bank draft to send or receive money from someone else is a cheque, pronounced the same as check.
Check has lots of other definitions too, in us English you use check for any of them
A cheque is money in a different form. A check is a symbol.
même affaire pour le français btw, je pense qu’on devrait changer des mots comme shampooing, wagon et fjord en champouin, vagon et fiord. ça fait juste plus de sens
Why? To be honest, the change you propose just makes them seem Dutch to me…
Gotta love that world class Canadian education system on display
It's the one Canadian spelling that somehow makes me irrationally angrier than all the rest when it's done wrong.
Centre/center, grey/gray, licence/license, defence/defense, i couldn't give a hoot...
But I will defend to the end that check is when you're looking for things, and cheque is anything to do with money. Neighbour/neighbor is a distant second place.
I was raised to see center and centre as:
Centre = a place Center = middle
If they are verbally pronounced the same way, then one of the spellings must be wrong. French spelling only maquese senco whenn pronouncedu whith thath stylè off pronunciationne.
It makes more sense when you look at Canadian/British/American English as different languages. Do (reasonable) people get upset when Germans, or Viatnamese, or whatever other language don't spell things the "right" way? No, because the cultural differences are understood. Same thing here, just in a more limited scope.
We've gotten somewhat bolder. We say "4Q..sorry" nowadays.
I recall playing a DOS wheel of fortune game (old computer game in case you're not fMilywith DOS, like late 80s and before 1995), one word was grey, but oh no not the British spelling. I had no idea why it was wrong when I was a kid...mean till my parents explained. We all had an offshoot from the same country why aren't the words spelled the same?
This is actually a meaningful intuition in a medieval/prehistoric times. You run out of food, you gotta wait a while for it to regrow. Nothing you do makes it regrow faster.
It's only in modern times that people try to work more when they're running out of food, as they try to work more to earn more money through wages, with which they can buy more food. That's a very opposite approach.