American spellings
Actually, the American spellings are the originals. They really should drop those old archaic spellings and use the modern ones we use. That and use international standard paper sizes (e.g. A4), dates in the format dd/mm/yyyy, and the metric system!
(An eejit passing by in a purple satin skirt with sparkly bits, Sun 3 Apr 2011, 22:42, 1 reply)

Original spellings?
Words like "honour" come from Latin; yes the Americans do have the originals there. But words like "centre" come directly from French so we do have some of the original spellings. I think. As for the date format, that annoys the hell out of me. I now make a point of saying "It's the third of April." rather than "It's April the third." April the third sounds like it could be either a date or the name of a monarch.
( Awk Industries is actually a helic- NO, STAY BACK SHARK!, Sun 3 Apr 2011, 23:00, closed)

Tut! You can't believe anything you see on TV any more...
I saw a programme ages ago where they explained the differences as being due to the Americans using an obsolete pre-War of Independence dictionary. Oh well.

The dates thing really gets me when it's on stuff like backup software. The number of times I have tried to recover something, put the date in as dd/mm/yyyy and its come back with "nothing backed up for that date". Usually accompanied by a horrible sinking feeling as my brain goes "shit fuck arse bollocks! the backups are screwed!" then followed by the realisation that American dates have struck again and that everything is fine.
(An eejit passing by in a purple satin skirt with sparkly bits, Sun 3 Apr 2011, 23:15, closed)

I'm fairly sure it was Collins
Who tried to create a version of English with easier spellings for a population of immigrants mainly from countries that don't speak English.

I may have dreamt this.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Sun 3 Apr 2011, 23:17, closed)