On a Sunday morning, with the radio playing old classic tunes, I stumbled across a word in one of my students’ essays: benefitted.
Now, to most people, this would just be a word. Read it, understand the sentence, correct the article and move on.
However, it gave me reason to pause and spend an hour searching and researching the word, looking up my trusty old Oxford dictionary, and asking not one, but four friends and fellow writers/editors about the word, which to me was now sitting in the docks.
The guilty party: benefitted.
What was its crime? It was an Americanism posing as a true-blue British English word.
At this point, I paused to make myself a cup of tea, as one is wont to do when faced with such a stiff-upper-lip English dilemma. Never mind that I was seated in the heat of my condo in Malaysia and have absolutely no English blood in me.
We had been colonised by the British long ago, our mothers loved the recently departed Queen (and sometimes the American Freddie Mercury version too) and Princess Diana. We all watched her wedding to Prince Charles, and then William and Kate’s wedding too.
Going back to the word in question, the problem was that the Oxford English Dictionary website said the correct spelling is “benefited”. Yet, when you do a search for what the spelling should be, so many websites say it is benefited (American) and benefitted (British).
No, that could not be right. Oxford said, “benefited”.
Out came the old hardcopy dictionary. It clearly stated: Benefited, benefiting; US benefitted, benefitting.
So, it was settled then, right?
It should have been. Another check on the internet and I found the Collins Online Dictionary.
It is also supposed to be British-based. It stated: benefitted in British English.
If so many websites say it is benefitted in British English and benefited in US English, could they all be wrong?
Who was the authority I could go to to clarify this? Was there an old person in a dusty old library somewhere in England who was the Keeper of the British English that I could speak with to find out the truth?
Or a mystic on some high mountain that I could see after trekking for days on end to find out The Truth? Who could I go to?
I contemplated checking what the BBC used, but it is a media house and has proven to be inconsistent in the past. There were times over the past 20 years that I had used this method to check what the correct British English spelling should be and came away realising that the BBC was none the wiser.
I wondered about the single-t and double-t words. Maybe examining those words would help me figure this out.
These are examples of words that use a double t for the past tense of a verb: batted, admitted, befitted, plotted.
Here are examples of words that use a single t for the past tense of a verb: aborted, carted, exploited, befitted.
So, then it got more confusing when I looked at three words which use some of the same letters: fitted, befitted, benefited.
At that point, my tea had finished, my friends were more confused, and I was tired from pondering the zaniness of the English language.
All I knew was, in Oxford I trust, the hardcopy version, not the newfangled one that keeps adding new words like “agak-agak” and “wayang“.
So, I gave up the search for the definitive (engraved in stone) British English version of the Ten Commandments.
I would go with “benefited” because a long time ago, when I started working at the newspaper, my colleagues gifted me a thick dictionary and said, “Use it well.” That Oxford has stayed with me since 1990, and it remains my English “bible”.
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent that of Twentytwo13.
