To be entirely transparent, this post is for my mental health. I am a socially anxious person, so social media is a special sort of torture for me and I may have opened a weird can of worms yesterday.
Let me paint the scene, because context matters.
Halfway through my cup of coffee yesterday, I was reviewing changes MS Word suggested for my manuscript when I happened upon the word burnt.
It had a blue line beneath it, saying something was up, so I clicked on it and in the margin of the screen Word explained that, in the context of the sentence with which I was using that word, burnt was the UK spelling whereas the American spelling would be burned.
Now, it is important to note that MS Word has done me dirty a time or two, so I zipped over to ye olde Merriam-Webster and, lo and behold, it affirmed that burnt and burned were used interchangeably as the past participle of burn in the UK.
Here’s the link for you. It’s honestly a little cheeky and I enjoyed this foray into language. LINK.
There are many, many, MANY more resources out there where the conversation delves deeper into the use of these words, but suffice to say, that is as far as I went on my half-cup-of-coffee brain power before slipping over to social media.
Here is the post I made on Threads –
Things I learned today… Burnt is the UK spelling of burned. Why do I like ‘burnt’ better? It just feels more aggressive to me and I like it.
Now, should I have added context? Yes.
The post was too vague and generalized the spelling of the word without explaining that it was being used to describe something as having been ‘burnt/burned’ into wood.
While my research stands and several lovely UK individuals affirmed that they do use burnt/burned interchangeably and went so far as to introduce me to learnt/learned, and spelt/spelled, the discussion did not end there.
200+ comments later and I was thrown into heights of social anxiety I had heretofore never experienced.
The majority of the conversation was pleasant and I appreciate all the commentary. I feel like I’ve grown as an author because of them, and I’ve found a few new authors to follow and whose books are now on my wish list.
Long story short, and without highlighting the less-than-pleasant commenters too much, context matters and I’ll be certain to include it next time.
I still prefer burnt to burned, but that’s no surprise because I also prefer grey to gray.
Happy writing, everyone.
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