Case of the Green Pearl, Part one

[reverend_alex]

”Well the smart money’s on Harlow, and the moon is in the street,
And the shadow boys are breaking all the laws,
And you’re east of east Saint Louis and the wind is making speeches,
And the rain sounds like a round of applause.”The rain beat nails into my window pane, distorting the noise and the grime of the street outside. Car horns blared and

Comments

[reverend_alex]

OK, first off your argument is flawed. American people use American words and spellings, regardless of whether the word is 'inherent' to their vernacular or not. French people do indeed write 'pneu', but it gets translated before it reaches a British audience. As the main character is clearly the one relating the story, and clearly not meant to be me, there is no reason to avoid american spelling.

Secondly, as the piece is (at best) a pastiche of the pulp detective genre, there is further argument for using the terms, spelling and literary devices of that genre- i.e. most of them are American, as in this case. Though it's true that most British works will go through an editing process to change words/spelling for an American audience, the same process is less often applied the other way round, though why this is, I couldn't say.

And finally, it was intentional, so even if your reasoning were acceptable to me, your pointing it out as a spelling mistake is not correct. Conversely, if you were to have pointed out that I have spelled 'criticising' with an s instead of a z, considering the arguments I have laid out above, you would have caught me out.

;)

And take care of that uniform, I've just had it dry-cleaned.