I’m fretting about grammar. No one warned me that the first comments I would receive about my novel (outside family and friends) would come from a grammar quibbler.
Yet the first feedback I have had about it comments that I have used American English spelling by using -ize. All I can say is that when I went to school in the UK, admittedly hundreds of years ago, that is what we were taught.
I have a physical copy of the Oxford Compact English Dictionary (1996) which has the following:
realize (also realise) and organize (also organise). It was printed in Oxford by the OUP.
So I pursued it further, and discovered that the internet is full of the -ize questions, and the answers are contradictory. I only put this out there because I’m now beginning to doubt myself. I could change each example I have used if I’m completely wrong. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter and as the dictionary suggests, they are interchangeable in certain cases. I’ve also just read Jeremy Butterfield’s blog on the subject with fond reference to the old curmudgeon Inspector Morse, and I’m still not sure. Perhaps it is not a question on which I should expend too much energy. Oh well, back to 1721 again.
