I only have ‘ize’ for you

It’s easy to blame the Americans, but sometimes — as the courts ruled in Perugia last week — they’re innocent. The case brought to mind another instance of injustice meted out to our transatlantic cousins, all in the name of that most exacting of mistresses: grammar. Of the many linguistic crimes we’ve accused them of committing, the most awful is the genocide of the suffix “ise”. We tut over spell-check, remark on the aesthetic superiority of that line of beauty — the curve of an “S” — and stand aghast at the cheek of attempting to deface their mother tongue. Replace the elegant slip of an “ise” with a clunky utilitarian “ize”?!

But we got it wrong.

When it comes to the choice between ‘S’ and ‘Z’, it might be a good time to digress and celebrate the re-launch