2026-07-03
I grew up on the English-speaking internet, where everyone is American, and as such have unthinkingly absorbed a bunch of Americanisms. More recently I've been trying to un-learn them, but they seem to be endless.
Some are obvious. I once found a preserved chat-log from years ago where I spelt colour without a U, which I definitely don't do anymore. Some are more subtle, like the spelling of defence and cancelled, or grammatical constructions such as "how it looks like". The worst ones are probably the cultural and political Americanisms, like implicitly assuming that Parliament works like the US congress or something.
I think the most dramatic de-Americanisation effort I've done, though, is my realisation earlier this year that the British spelling of programme can be used even when talking about software, and subsequent replacement of every instance of "program" with "programme" throughout this site. I did this shortly before the site went live. I even changed the comments and variable names in source code.
That said, I think the best way to de-Americanise oneself is not to try and consciously enumerate every Americanism (although this is nonetheless a worthwhile effort), but to expose oneself to more British (or wherever you're from) media, which is what I've been trying to do.
It's interesting that the great promise of the internet, that it would eradicate borders and bring humanity together, is now the one thing I want to avoid. It's also interesting that I'm writing this on the eve of the semiquincentennial of the rogue colonies.