H. L. Mencken

“ In the same way American usage prefers esophagus, diarrhea and gonorrhea to the English æsophagus, diarrhæa and gonorrhæa. In the style book of the Journal of the American Medical Association I find many other spellings that would shock an English medical author, among them curet for curette, cocain for cocaine, gage for gauge, intern for interne, lacrimal for lachrymal, and a whole group of words ending in -er instead of in -re. [6]
Webster’s reforms, it goes without saying, have not passed unchallenged by the guardians of tradition. ”

“ A glance at the literature of the first years of the nineteenth century shows that most of the serious authors of the time ignored his new spellings, though they were quickly adopted by the newspapers. ”

“ Webster, in fact, delighted in controversy, and was anything but free from the national yearning to make a sensation.
A great many of his innovations, of course, failed to take root, and in the course of time he abandoned some of them himself. In his early “Essay on the Necessity, Advantage and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling” he advocated reforms which were already discarded by the time he published the first edition of his dictionary. ”

“ But now and then a curious foreshadowing of later American usage is encountered. On July 4, 1631, for example, John Winthrop wrote in his journal that “the governour built a bark at Mistick which was launched this day.” During the eighteenth century, however, and especially after the publication of Johnson’s dictionary, there was a general movement in England toward a more inflexible orthography, and many hard and fast rules, still surviving, were then laid down. ”