| The correct spelling of "theatre/theater" ... | |
| Posted by: flaguy 06:50 am EDT 05/16/18 | |
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| Glenda Jackson brought up the spelling of 'theatre/theater" on the Stephen Colbert show (mentioned below in another post), but only indicated Americans don't know how to spell it correctly, without any further explanation. Okay, so according to "Grammarist" (see link below): "The main thing that most English speakers and learners need to know is that theater is the preferred spelling in American English, and theatre is preferred virtually everywhere else. ... The American preference for theater is a late-20th-century development (though the spelling itself is a centuries-old variant), so it is understandable that some people still resist it, and its newness means that exceptions are very easily found, but in this century the preference is entrenched." And they go on to explain: "Some Americans do make distinctions—for instance, that a theater is a venue while theatre is an art form, or that a theater is a movie theater while a theatre is a drama venue." Yeah, I've heard all that before. But playwright/teacher Milan ('THE RUNNER STUMBLES') Stitt, a great intellect (in my humble opinion) who once ran the playwriting departments at the Yale School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon and, many years before that, also ran the playwriting school at the Circle Repertory Company (originally called "Circle Theater Company"), used to tell his pupils (me among them) "It's 'theater,' because we are NOT a FRENCH 'theatre' company." If that's the rationale behind the American preference for the spelling of 'theater,' I wonder why the British (and the rest of the world, apparently) cling to it so? |
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| Link | http://grammarist.com/spelling/theater-theatre |
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