Why Americans write 'canceled' but still write 'cancellation.' How printing history gave us 'fine print.' Fluff.
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about the weird spelling of the words canceled and cancellation, and then we'll learn why we talk about reading the fine print.

There's a relatively simple question I often get asked about the word cancelled. Do you write it with one L or two? Well, it depends on where you live. Cancelled with one L is more common in American English, and cancelled with two Ls is more common in British, Canadian, and Australian English. But these aren't hard and fast rules, either.

A Google Ngram search of published books definitely shows crossover. And I also have to say that whenever I talk about this rule, I always hear from Americans who say they prefer the spelling with two L's. I don't make the rules. I just tell you what they are. And if you're writing for yourself, use whatever you want.

But if an editor is editing your text, you'll probably get a suggestion to change the spelling if you violate the country's specific preferences.

The AP Stylebook, for example, the stylebook used by many American news outlets and corporate communications departments, it recommends cancelled with one L, as does Garner's Modern English Usage. The Chicago Manual of Style doesn't seem to address the topic, but does use American spellings in the text of the book. Also, cancelled isn't the only word that has this British-American spelling difference.

Noah Webster is usually credited with creating American spellings that have fewer letters than British spellings, such as color and flavor, without the U, and canceled with one L. Other words Americans spell with one L and people using British English spell with two include traveled, dialed, labeled, and signaled.

But now, recently, I got a more difficult question from a grammarpalusian named Jim. He asked about the word cancellation.

Merriam-Webster, an American dictionary, recommends spelling it with two L's, even though it recommends the one L spelling for cancelled and cancelling, like every other American reference book. Jim thought that seemed inconsistent. What's up with the double L in just cancellation?

Well, it turns out it has to do with the way we treat suffixes and stressed syllables, because we usually double the L when the syllable before the suffix is stressed.

In other words, because we pronounce cancellation with the stress on the A, cancellation, we double the L before we add the rest of the letters. We don't do it for canceling because the stress is still on the first syllable. Canceling, just like cancel.

So, that pronunciation-based rule makes for the inconsistent spelling: one L in canceling, but two L's in cancellation. I know it seems inconsistent, but all the style guides and dictionaries agree that these are the dominant American spellings. And to finish up, cancel has a fun origin, too. According to Etym Online, it comes from a Latin word that originally meant "latus."

And a tiny bit later, the meaning expanded and people started using it to mean to cross out something written by marking it with crossed lines. So that makes sense. You're putting a little lattice over your words. So that's the meaning it originally had when it came into English in the 1400s. Interestingly, in the 1500s and 1600s, people also used cancel figuratively to describe a prison or constraint.

As in this example from the Oxford English Dictionary, where an Irish bishop refers to, quote, a person whose spirit is confined and desires no enlargement beyond the cancels of the body, unquote, using cancels as a noun to describe the limits or confines of the body. But this meaning is archaic. People don't use it this way anymore.

In summary, if you're writing for an American audience, spell cancelled with one L. If you're writing for a British audience, spell cancelled with two L's. And cancellation has two L's everywhere. Thanks for the question, Jim. This next segment is by Glenn Fleischman.

Some phrases have complicated histories requiring deep dives into analogy, etymology, and idiom. Other times, you come across phrases that seem purely literal, but you still might wonder why we use them at all. The phrase fine print falls into this latter camp.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the literal use, as in a small size of type, dates to 1761. But before people talked about fine print, they talked about small print, and that phrase goes back much farther to 1551.

The figurative sense for both phrases emerged around the same time, though. Around 1900, people started using fine print or small print in a figurative way to talk about information that supplements or qualifies the main point of a document.

In a practical sense, though, why was small type such a big deal that the phrase took on a life of its own? And how small does something have to be to be considered fine print? Well, until the 1880s, all type was set by hand. Every letter, number, and piece of punctuation was a sliver of metal with a raised or relief part at one end that got inked on a press.

These individual pieces of type were assembled into words and pages by typesetters, who were also known as compositors because they composed type into something bigger. Typesetters spent their days on a stool in front of a cabinet full of type drawers called cases. Every size and style of type lived in a different drawer.

But an entire font of metal type usually didn't fit in one drawer. So there were two cases, one containing minuscules and one containing majuscules, little letters and big letters.

When working on a project, typesetters would arrange their cases on a tilted rack with the smaller, more frequently used letters lower, which kept them closer, and the larger capital letters on the farther upper part of the rack. And this is where we get the names lowercase and uppercase for the different types of letters.

Finally, and importantly for our discussion of fine print, each character had its own cubbyhole in the drawer, according to a standard called the lay of the case that typesetters memorized as apprentices. Now, through the early 20th century, typesetters were paid not by the hour, but by how much type they set, measured not by the letter, but by the width of type, using the capital letter M as the gauge.

But not all composition work is the same. There are routine jobs like setting type for a newspaper, magazine, or book. And then anything more complicated often costs more. For example, it would likely cost more to set something in a language other than the printer's usual language, to set mathematical equations, or to set complicated groupings of text in advertising.

And in particular, setting smaller type cost more because it was harder. The slivers of type were smaller, and although an experienced typesetter could pull type from the right cubbyhole, remembering the lay of the case, it was hard to double-check by eye.

Until the advent of high-quality electric light bulbs, typesetters worked in poorly ventilated rooms full of smoke from oil lamps and their own tobacco, so it was hard to see all those tiny letters.

Now, before roughly the 1880s, instead of having the exacting sizes like we have today, like 10-point or 12-point, the many foundries described their type sizes with delightful names that were only approximately the same size between competitors. Going from smallest to largest, they had Brilliant, Diamond, Precious,

Pearl, agate, nonpareil, minion, breviere, bourgeois, long primer, small pica, pica, English, Colombian, great primer, paragon, and then usually multiples of those words like double small pica to indicate twice the height of small pica.

Now, newspapers typically set their type well into the 1900s in Minion, Brevier, or Bourgeois, about seven, eight, and nine points respectively in modern terms. The lower end of that range would seem absurdly small to our modern eyes. We would be squinting to read it. Print newspapers today tend to use the larger end of that range, with most stories set around nine points.

Books aimed at adult readers in the past tended to use small pica and long primer about 10 and 11 points, which is similar to how they're printed today, although it can go up to 12 points for regular books and much larger for large print titles.

Now, all this history helps us peg what people meant when they first started talking about small print or fine print. They meant something smaller than the standard used for most newspapers or books, the common things people were printing. Brilliant, Diamond, and Pearl were three and a half, four and a half, and five points in size.

And in one example from the pay scale published by a typographical union in 1815, you can see that fine print costs more. Remember that English was also the name of a type size. It reads, All works in the English language, common matter, so that meant nothing fancy like foreign languages or equations, common matter, from English to Minyan, inclusive, 27 cents per thousand ems.

In nonpareil, 29 cents. In pearl, 37 cents. In diamond, 50 cents. So the smaller the size, the more expensive. Perversely, publishers often made a lot of money off fine print, making it worth paying typesetters much more per line of type.

Legal notices appeared in fine print to keep down size and costs. Legislatures often mandated that certain information had to appear in a newspaper of record before an action could be taken, and even required certain sizes of type. The newspapers were paid well for these notices and wanted to squeeze in as many as possible.

Publishers also sold classified ads that generally appeared in plain, tiny type, placed by individuals and small businesses, and which appeared or were classified by category. Readers pored over these ads, looking for jobs, items to purchase, and even personal messages, such as missed connections.

Publishers charged a relatively high price for these small ads and might run dozens to hundreds of pages of them a week, a real cash cow that offset the cost of composition.

As typesetting became mechanized in the 1880s, first at newspapers and later for book publishers, and paper and printing became cheaper, squeezing in as much type as possible became less important. The type for things like legal notices, classifieds, and other less important news got bigger along with the type in the main body of the paper.

A 1924 book on newspaper layout noted, quote, There's been a steady improvement in the last hundred years in the type sizes of books. While it was the fashion in the early 19th century to issue books with torturing fine print, publishers now advertise their books as easy to read. Magazines also have long recognized this phase of public taste.

Overthrown in books and magazines, fine print is making its last wavering stand in the newspaper, unquote.

The term fine print survives to this day almost exclusively referring to contracts like legal documents and terms and conditions. It's the stuff people don't want or expect us to read despite it having consequences. In the past, fine print was often used to save space, but in the present, it's often used to hide things.

That segment was by Glenn Fleischman, a typesetter, graphic designer, journalist, print historian, and author of the book How Comics Were Made, a visual history from the drawing board to the printed page, which you can find at howcomicsweremade.inc. And that's dot I-N-K. Finally, I have a familect story.

So I want to tell you about a family dialect. My name is Judy. When one of my sons was about two years old, we were all sitting at the kitchen table and he was playing with a little car. And then suddenly he said, fluff. And we went, what? He said, fluff. And we looked and he had dropped the car on the floor and we realized he was saying that it

it fell off. And so from then on, we always say something floss. It floss, it floss. And then that kind of went to flover where we say that instead of sellover. So our family's been doing that for years. It floss or it flover. Thanks for asking. It's a fun story to share.

How fun. Thanks, Judy. If you want to share the story of your family act, a word or phrase that you use only with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. And if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.

Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin in ad hoops and marketing, Dan Feierabend in audio, Holly Hutchings in digital operations, Morgan Christensen in advertising, and Brannon Goetjes, director of podcasts, who's an avid moviegoer who's seen every Oscar film this year. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book, The Grammar Daily. That's all. Thanks for listening.