I see the absent of letters from ENGLISH words as laziness (ooooh - now THERE'S a ZED in its proper place)
LOL! Good to see a Z!! But dunno where the ' ' came from, but HTML's British/Swiss isn't it?... ;-) (mmm... edited agin... wondering where the funny looking HTML code has gone to... mmmmm.... and where's the sapce coming from... grrrr...) Anyway... now your neck is out... :-) that's the thing with British language... it's a moral thing, a statement of 'standards', and a status thing... not just a means to communicate clearly and effectively... but a way of demonstrating one's virtue and industriousness... So, the effect of proving how unlazy the British are is a whole lot of keyboard operators putting billions of 'u' characters where they ain't needed each year! Life's too short! Gobsmacked at praise to Webster for making sense of the ad hoc English spelling and grammar rules that what's-his-name arbitrarily determined for the OED? Just check out how many ways Sheiksbeir spelled his own name! Neither rhyme nor reason there! (It's just a bloody language, and half the the Poms speak it as good as the other half play cricket!! :-)) ...and at least Webster had a system and a plan! Cheers, Max (Edited to note that Max is about to go and watch The Bill...always an interesting sociological insight... :)