Commonwealth English (question for Canadian, Australian posters & so on)

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Apparently it's now standard in the scientific community to spell "sulphur" as "sulfur".  Abominable.

This is outrageous and it's things like this that make me distrust science.  How can I take what they say about global warming seriously if they can't even spell one of the most common elements?  Truly shocking.

Go take your sulfphurous opinions about how to spell the elements and go wrap them up in aluminium foil.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The primary grammatical difference I observe between American and British English is that British writers seem to be allergic to the subjunctive and will go to great (and, to an American eye, often ungrammatical) lengths to avoid using it.

What’s an example of the subjunctive tense in English ?

If I were a rich man ...

More seriously, one reason that the subjunctive is often avoided is that it is rarely distinctive from the indicative. With regular verbs, the only difference is in the third person singular present, "he sing" instead of "he sings". The irregular verb "to be" is the one where the subjunctive is most distinctive, where the bare "be" is the subjunctive in all persons and numbers of the present tense and "were" is the subjunctive in all persons and numbers of the past tense.