George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde or Dylan Thomas or even Winston Churchill, the attribution is unclear) once quipped that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”, and part of the reason for the differences between the two versions of English lies in the American proclivity for reform and simplification of the language. In the 1760s, Benjamin Franklin campaigned vigorously for the reform of spelling (he advocated the discontinuation of the “unnecessary letters “c”, “w”, “y” and “j” and the addition of six new letters), as later did Noah Webster and Mark Twain. To be fair, there were also calls for reform in Britain, including from such literary luminaries as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and even Charles Darwin, although the British efforts generally had little or no effect.