For someone, like myself, who finds spelling and grammatical errors such a pet peeve, it’s shocking that until this weekend I only just noticed the difference in spellings of the word ‘barbeque’.
I have always been a speller of the word with the ‘que’. I’m not sure if it’s how we were taught to spell it at J.W. Killiam Elementary School or if I have picked it up along the way. I’m not sure if it’s just something I developed, seeing as the abbreviated word is BBQ or bar-b-q. It would seem only natural to add in the ‘q’.
Then I had to wonder if the reason why I noticed the spelling difference was because I was in England. Perhaps in English it’s spelled ‘barbecue’ and in American English it’s spelled ‘barbeque’. But after a bit of research in Google, Websters, and Oxford Dictionary, it seems to be a bit of a palava.
Where more often than not the dictionary will show the spelling of ‘barbecue’ and then in parentheses (barbeque common variant) – I’m not sure if this means there’s a correct spelling or not?
Then there’s the argument that the spelling of ‘barbeque’ would actually be phonetically spoken as ‘barbeck’ – like the word ‘discoteque’. This would surely rule out the spelling of barbeque. But unfortunately English is a funny one because where certainly words follow a rule, there are always the few that don’t (cow is not spoken like mow, but like row – in English anyways – but then in American English row is like mow and not like cow – how annoying!!).
But I may have to concede my spelling of barbeque as it seems it’s more often spelled with a c and not a q. The Guardian style guide only has the spelling of it with a c. Same with The Times/Sunday Times and Times Online style guide. And the AP Stylebook spells it as barbecue as well.
Seems I’m going to need to make the switch immediately! Although, it’s still OK to abbreviate to BBQ – and that is fine with me.
