R. Alan Smith from San Diego, California, is a strategic advisor. Or is he an adviser? There’s been a shift over the years from the -er spelling to the -or, but we’re pleased to announce that despite the style guides, advisor is the overwhelmingly preferred version, and is absolutely correct! This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Advisor vs. Adviser”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is R. Allen Smith.
R. Allen Smith?
Do you go by R?
I go by Allen, but everybody in San Diego where I’m from calls me R. Allen Smith.
Okay, well we are too, so we will as well.
Go ahead, R. Allen Smith. What can we do for you?
Well, I tell you, I’ve been repositioning my business. I’ve been an attorney and an executive coach and a number of other things. And I added the title of strategic advisor, and I have been spelling it A-D-V-I-S-O-R, which looks right to me, but my spell check keeps telling me it wants to do E-R.
So I went on the Internet, and I found that both spellings are acceptable, that the OR is a more, I guess, a U.S. version of it. But I’m worried that I will damage my credibility if I’m spelling it in a way that people say, what could he possibly know if he doesn’t know how to spell advisor rate?
That’s very good. What a great question. And your preferred spelling is OR, advisor OR on the end, right?
That’s my preference. That’s what looks right to me.
I’m with you. I really am. Always looks wrong to me.
It always looks wrong to me, too. And you know why we have, the three of us have that feeling? Is because it turns out, and you’re going to love this, this is brand new data, the OR spelling actually is more common in all of North America and is almost about to overtake the spelling in the UK.
Oh, yay! Yay! Yay! This is great news!
Listen, what this means is that all of the dictionaries and usage guides and spelling manuals are out of date. Wow. They have not caught up.
I can’t tell you how exciting this is for us. And they’ll probably still be giving this bad advice about the spelling for another 10 or 20 years before they all kind of, like, get to it.
They’re going to be bad advisors. Yeah.
So, for example. They should be advisors. For example, one of the sources quotes the British National Corpus, which is this giant body of text.
The thing is, it’s a tiny body of text, relatively speaking, because now I can go into bigger bodies of text, look at them across time, and you can see where Advisor, around the year 2000, starts to be more often spelled with an OR and less often spelled with an.
This is hot chat for us, R. Allen.
It is, and I feel like I’m at the front end of a wave.
You’re an innovator.
Cowabunga.
What’s really interesting, we have a weird feedback loop when it comes to these style guides.
Just bear with me one second, R. Alan Smith.
I’m going to explain this to you.
So the usage guides, what they do is say, what are all the best writers doing in their writing?
And so they go look in newspapers and magazines and books and say, oh, they’re all spelling E-R.
Therefore, the best spelling is E-R.
And they put it into their style guide.
But what do the editors of these newspapers and magazines and books use in order to decide how to spell?
They use that very same style guide.
And so what happens is if you leave out newspapers and magazines and books that are using these particular style guides and you go with intelligent, well-written, educated text.
I’m not talking like fly-by-night emails or anything like that.
If you go with real legitimate writing, you will find 90% of people use OR.
90% of them.
Wow.
Be darned.
It’s just these style guides have perpetuated something, and then they keep using the evidence of their own influence as evidence that they should continue to keep that rule in place.
It’s very wrong.
This explains so much.
When will the word processing spell checkers catch up with this?
Well, given that Microsoft Word has had some of its errors in its spell checker and its grammar checker for 30 years, never.
30.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
I hope we helped some.
Go ahead with O-R, and you’re going to find that most people aren’t even going to bat an eye at it.
In fact, why don’t you change your name to O-R Alan Smith?
I think that would be…
Well, one of my personal email addresses is ouralan, O-U-R-A-L-A-N.
There we go.
Thanks for calling, buddy.
Thank you.
Good luck.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
It was nice to hear that Advisor was beating the carp out of Adviser.
As the foreign student advisor of my school, I have some advice for you:
a. use advisor with confidence when it is part of a title: The Foreign Policy Advisor.
b. use adviser when it is generic: he is an adviser to the president.
I did some research on this, but as it is now New Years Eve, I have forgotten where I found this.
Another case: I am a professor of English, but sometimes I am a professer of my ignorance. lol.