[Cryptography] The Strange Story of Satoshi Nakamoto's Spelling Choices: Part 1.

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 6:48 PM bit <bit at ungeared.com> wrote:

> We've published a small study of Satoshi Nakamoto's writing style
> <https://ungeared.com/the-strange-story-of-satoshi-nakamotos-spelling-choices-part-1/> -
> the first part was focused on his spelling choices. We went through every
> word written by Satoshi and picked out words that are spelled differently
> in American & British English and also all of his misspellings (contrary to
> popular belief, his spelling wasn't always perfect). We identified 108 such
> instances (likely we missed some, it was a manual process): American – 52,
> British – 35 and Misspelled – 21. We can’t post picture here, there’re a
> lot of charts/graphs on our site, they help a lot-:)
>
>
>
> *Satoshi Was Consistently Inconsistent*
>
> Perhaps, the biggest takeaway from our research is that Satoshi was highly
> inconsistent in his use of American and British spelling and he was
> inconsistent from the very beginning. Many have noticed that in the Bitcoin
> whitepaper the British spelling of "favour", however, seemingly no one had
> spotted that in the same paper, he used American spelling for
> "characterized" (British: "characterised"). Interestingly, this
> irregularity would have been consistent with the rules of Canadian English.
>

That is not quite correct. -ize is not just acceptable in British English.
Fowler and Fowler actually recommend it as the prefered spelling.

As with the Oxford comma, the -ize ending is a modernization that
originated at Oxford and has not gained widespread use. But it is
considered valid. Even a 'tab probably won't object at this point.

Since I write for US and UK audiences regularly, I switch between colour
and color. Its like driving on the other side of the road when I cross the
border, its just something I do automatically. If you turn on British
English Word, I believe it accepts -ize but will flag favor as an error. So
this would argue for Satoshi being an Oxonian or an American trying to
conceal his tracks by turning on Canadian or British English.
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