I'm a good speller. I want to be consistent in following the English-English I'm steeped in. But I like American-English spelling more than English-English. It would be going too far to say it's more elegant (that's the preserve of the use of words, not of the way words are spelled), but it's more logical to my eyes. The danger comes in mixing up the two and looking foolish. Brits who glibly criticise American-English spelling as somehow inferior had better remember that the correct word is "aluminum". "Aluminium" is just plain wrong. Likewise, "licorice", the US spelling, has far greater claim to correctness than the English-English "liquorice", which is a semi-literate construction based on confusion over the word "liquor", which has nothing to do with it. So, next time you hear scorn heaped on American spelling, yanks, make sure you have both those in your armoury. Er, armory. Er, bugger it...