I find it annoying that in order to get my Mac to check my spelling against an English dictionary instead of an American English dictionary, I must select from the following list:

That's right. American English has been promoted to just "English". Sure, I know this is an American program, but why not be consistent and label it "American English"?

For those who aren't familiar with this particular bit of history: when Noah Webster was first compiling his American dictionary, he decided that it was a great opportunity to impose his theory of simplified spelling on the public. Some of his ideas stuck in future editions (such as the changing of most –our and –re words to end in –or and –er respectively), others he later relented on (such as spelling 'determine' without its final 'e', or replacing 'crowd' with 'croud').

As such, I find it rather offensive that on my computer, Noah Webster's whim has become plain "English" whereas its parent, the English language, has been ghettoised into "British English".

On a related note, when working on some code yesterday, I was forced into a spelling corner. The CSS standard spells 'colour' the American way: 'color'. If I'm writing a method to customise CSS files, should I spell it the way that is natural to both me and my colleagues, or should I go with the way it's spelled inside CSS?

After some internal debate, and a short rant to a cow-orker, I decided it was probably best to go with 'color' for the sake of external consistency. An hour later, of course, I was doing a global search-and-replace for everywhere my fingers had typed 'colour' for me without being asked.