‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’
‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Do you know,’ replied my husband, ‘I can’t remember.’ So that’s his last useful function gone.
I was asking because, in a discussion of hospital posts for young doctors, the news kept referring to specialties, and I itched for specialities. Fowler’s Modern English Usage confirms that specialty is used especially in North America, but also in Britain, in the two chief senses of ‘a special pursuit’ and ‘a special feature or skill’. But the Oxford Guide to English Usage says that specialty is ‘restricted to North America’.
What then of other optional syllables: orient or orientate; burgle or burglarise?
We tend to think that we are given to irrational hatreds of Americanisms, but Americans have mirror-image distastes for British usages.
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