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

[bit]

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at hallambaker.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, January 6, 2021 12:26 AM
To: bit <bit at ungeared.com>
Cc: Cryptography Mailing List <cryptography at metzdowd.com>
Subject: Re: [Cryptography] The Strange Story of Satoshi Nakamoto's Spelling Choices: Part 1.

 

 

 

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

 

It appears that in practice, still -ise is much more widely used by the Brits than -ize.

 

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.

 

We have also noticed that Word when set to UK English doesn’t correct verbs spelled with -ize, but forgot to mention it.  And it could potentially explain some of the inconsistencies. 

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