In my younger years, I dedicated an undue amount of energy to opposing Microsoft. Of course, being in my younger years at the time, this consisted of a series of appallingly immature and impotent oppositions, such as adding a disclaimer to the bottom of my first web site declaring that performance could not be guaranteed if it was viewed with “Micro$oft Internet Exploder”. (I was particularly proud of myself for that pun; alas, I shortly encountered the cleverer pun “Internet Exploiter” and fell into a deep depression.)
As time wore on, I began to realize that I hadn’t really had a good reason to oppose Microsoft, aside from the fact that everyone else was doing it. Since that realization, I’ve warmed significantly to Microsoft, but we still have our ups-and-downs. Windows 95 and 98 charmed me, but then Clippit and Windows ME soured my goodwill like milk left out in the sun. Spending a year in Redmond with all of my friends working at Microsoft gave me a much better opinion of the company; not because my friends painted a better picture of life at Microsoft, but rather because they gave me gifts of cheap software and free juice.
But the honeymoon’s over now; it turns out Microsoft is the domineering juggernaut that I had thought it was in the early 90s. I typed “judgement” into Word, just like I always spell it, and it red-squiggly-underlined it, just like it always does. “Man,” I asked myself (and the turtles swimming in the tank across the room), “why do I always put an ‘e’ in judgment if it’s not supposed to be there?” The turtles seemed content to take the red-squiggly underline lying down, but not me. It was time to find out why the e was verboten. I headed over to the OED and MWDEU, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a miniature e ‘mongst eight tiny other letters! It turns out that, despite Microsoft’s crimson corrugated admonition, judgement is acceptable in American English. Sure, it’s less common than judgment, but that’s no reason to ban its use.
And so now the scales are off my eyes, the wolf in sheep’s clothing is exposed! Microsoft is a bunch of scheming tricksters, sneakily excising excessive e‘s from the language for reasons incomprehensible! Here I’ve been suffering under the delusion for years that there could be but one e in judgment and that my brain was broken for trying to greedily include another. Needless to say, Microsoft, it will take a lot of cut-rate software and juice to woo me back. Or at least the addition of judgement to the Word dictionary. I eagerly await either action — but, if it can only be one, please make it the former.
[Unfortunately, it turns out that OpenOffice Writer suffers the same anti-e bigotry as Word. Alas! What am I to write in now? Emacs?! And Firefox doesn’t believe judgement is a word, either! Looks like it’s back to Lynx for me.]
Summary: judgement can be spelled with or without the e, in both American and British English. Judgment is apparently commoner in American English and judgement‘s commoner in British English.
8 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 14, 2008 at 5:04 pm
mike
A feature that Word sorely needs is a dial for the spelling checker that lets people crank it from “Lax-liberal language ruinator” to “English as God intended it.” Or maybe it should be sold in various editions, like “Microsoft Word AG (Anything Goes)” and “Microsoft Word CE (Correct English)”.
Hmm. Might be a market here.
July 14, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Jonathon
I’m glad to see that there are other right-thinking people in the world who know the best way to spell “judgement.” That’s how I’ve always been inclined to spell it (and I’ve always been an excellent speller, so it’s not an issue of me being unable to remember how it should be spelled), and that’s what makes the most sense. I don’t see how by itself should represent [dʒ].
July 14, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Jonathon
Oops. WordPress apparently thought I was trying to do HTML, and it cut out a little piece of my comment. That last line was supposed to read, “I don’t see how ‘dg’ by itself should represent [dʒ],” except that I used angle brackets instead of quotes.
July 15, 2008 at 7:19 am
Gabe
mike: A friend gave a 286 laptop once that weighed around 15 pounds, had a monochromatic screen, cut off circulation to your feet, and held a charge for about 15 minutes. And yet, its word processor would let you adjust the level of specificity you wanted (informal, business, or formal). But that might only have applied to the grammar checker, not the spell checker. I can’t remember now.
Jonathon: I’m glad I’m not alone as well. English already has enough crazy idiosyncratic spellings, right? No need to make a new one.
July 18, 2008 at 2:12 pm
mike
@gabe — yup, the grammar checker in Word does have some levers and dials that supposably let a body set how severely one wants to be chastised. I had an exchange with Geoff Pullum about this once. I argued that it was no fair to diss Word all the time, because this sort of thing is in fact settable. His counterargument was not to disagree with the technical correctness of my observation, but instead to note that few enough people know of such a feature, and that in any event, most people are cowed by their computers, and if the computer says “Bad writer! No passive!” they’ll, like, totally believe that.
This exchange has been immortalized for the ages here:
http://www.mikepope.com/blog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=1753
July 20, 2008 at 3:58 pm
The Ridger
Of course, one of the options you are always given is “add to dictionary” so this should never bother you more than once.
July 21, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Gabe
mike & The Ridger: Those are both fair points, and I would gladly agree with you if I weren’t so busy sitting by the mailbox waiting for Microsoft hush money.
September 2, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Undatability « Motivated Grammar
[…] standard, it’s not even favored. I don’t know what has led me to put e’s into words that others leave e-free, but I am forced to assume it was some scabbed-over traumatic childhood […]