Franc Zabkar writes:

On Thu, 3 Jul 2008 18:16:32 +0100, "Fleetie"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Bloody hell!

It's an English vs. American English thing.

English uses "labelled", and is of course the correct one.


Martin

I was recently watching a spelling bee on TV. It occurred to me that
such a contest must seem very silly to those viewers whose mother
tongue is phonetic, as all languages should be. English could have
become phonetic many centuries ago, when the language came under
formal review

This never happened, and I'm not entirely clear on what you mean
here. What is 'formal review' in this context? Who was doing the
reviewing? What authority did they have?

, but the traditionalists triumphed over the
phoneticists,

No, there were no such camps. There have been various attempts to
reform English orthography championed by people such as Noah Webster,
Thomas Jefferson, George Bernard Shaw, and others, but none of them
have caught on among the great majority of people who use the
language.

so we are stuck with a stupid, inconsistent system of
spelling. In a lot of ways American revisionism makes sense, eg
"color" instead of "colour", but I don't understand how "arse" became
"ass",

I don't think 'arse' and 'ass' are pronounced the same way.

or why Americans say "off of" when "off" will suffice.

I say "Get off the boat." and "Get the sticker off the book." and I'm
an American born and raised. I think you're confusing a habit of some
Americans (some of the time) with a habit of all Americans all of the
time.