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Guardian America Goes On The Offence

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by Jeff Bercovici
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Oct 23 2007 12:00am EDT

Guardian America Goes on the Offence

Those cheeky Brits! Guardian America launches today with a linguistic shot across the bow:

Guardian America, the US edition of the British newspaper, won't use American spellings and punctuation.... Valour, behaviour, realise and programme therefore will prevail over valor, behavior, realize and program. Nor will there be the serial comma -- sometimes known, pretentiously, as the Oxford comma -- which is familiar to many American publications....

Perhaps most strikingly -- and certainly most vexingly to Guardian America's editor, who tells me he made his views clear to London, but with little success -- a State Department official will have to live with the more flattened description of him- or herself as a state department official: the rule for capitalisation is to lower case when possible.

It's the end of civilization, but civilisation, such as it is, will carry on.

This would all be a lot more shocking if Brits weren't already running half the publishing business.

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