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The US might have the biggest number of English as a first langauge speakers in the world, but there’s many times that who have it as a second language, and most of ’em use (mostly-) British spellings.

I’ll keep my colour and neighbour and favourite and defence, thanks. :)

As Bill Bryson’s several excellent books on the history of English (on both sides of the pond) points out, we spell things like they were pronounced 400 years ago: “knee” was indeed pronounced “kuh-nee”. Heck, most of our words don’t match up very well, either with their constituent letters or with each other (plough, cough, though and through come to mind).

Besides, I like the u’s in there. They remind me that a good chunk of our lexicon came from French (cf. couleur, honeur) — and them’s the folks what done given you your fancy-pants Statue o’ Liberty. Most of the rest came from Latin and Norse, which is why we have so many darn words for the same thing (e.g. royal, regal, kingly).

I don’t feel like I’m under any sort of boot heel — Liz seems pretty nice, so I don’t mind having her on all our coins. The monarchy doesn’t really hold any power in governments in the Commonwealth, other than largely ceremonial rubber-stamp duties (the King-Byng Affair being a notable exception; it’s less tawdry than you might think).

Seriously though, if you like this sort of thing — and it’s pretty clear that I do — you really oughtta check out Bryson’s The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, available at fine bookstores everywhere, and probably in your neighbourhood.