Documenting a preference for US English?

[Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz>]

On 2017-10-13 01:04, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Thanks, this is fine with me, but please in the future use the US
> English spelling of words such as "behavior".

Sure, I'll attempt to keep this in mind in future.

I spotted that I had both spellings of that word (I'd copied the US
spelling from your suggestion, but typed the UK spelling elsewhere),
and I then spent some time trying to establish whether US spelling
was preferred, but (a) I didn't find anything in the documentation,
and (b) I found other pre-existing instances of UK English elsewhere,
so I ended up changing them to the UK spelling for internal consistency
with the rest of the documentation I'd written (on the assumption that
there may have been other such words as well -- UK spelling is never
going to jump out at me as wrong, so I won't necessarily realise if a
given word has a different spelling in US English in the first place).

I've also now found the following discussion from 2008 regarding the
existing instances of UK English:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-06/msg01848.html

Is there such a recommendation in the documentation that I missed,
though?  If not, it sounds like it would be a good thing to add
somewhere.

I had grepped for "english" and then for "american" and "US" within
those results, and didn't turn up any instructions to this end.

There is, however, the following example in lisp/textmodes/ispell.el:

;; Local Variables:
;; mode: emacs-lisp
;; comment-column: 40
;; ispell-check-comments: exclusive
;; ispell-local-dictionary: "american"
;; End:

Perhaps the Emacs repository's .dir-locals.el entry for emacs-lisp-mode
ought to include these ispell variables?


-Phil