Scepticism and Restraint

I must have known this at some time but today I discovered that I have an archaic and wonky way of spelling sceptical. Usually I realize that there are alternatives to my oddball tendencies. Sometimes I first learned a word while reading British books, and sometimes my spellings might have been more common 35 years ago when I learned the word, and somethings must just be weird affectations I picked up along the way.

For example, I write grey instead of gray and blonde instead of blond. (I think that last one comes from Bob Dylan)
My heart is with cataloguing instead of cataloging even though I have to be modern and up-to-date in my work writing to avoid being pretentious.
I cross my sevens and Z's (my 7th grade teacher did that), but I don't call Z's zeds.
I say soda more often than pop even though I grew up in Detroit.

But this sceptical thing threw me for a loop. I was writing a comment to a friend's blog post and the spelling corrector underlined my word in red. I knew it must want me to write skeptical but when I typed it out, while it didn't look wrong (I must see this word all the time!) it didn't exactly look right. So I Googled and read some stuff, apparently sceptical is more British/Australian and archaic.

In other news, I have shown GREAT RESTRAINT in my past two posts by not making musical connections to my thoughts. No one wanted to think about or hear any of the songs related to peanuts or circus and, while I am fascinated to confirm that skeptical really doesn't turn up in The Logical Song, I'm pretty sure I'm doing everyone a favor by not playing Supertramp*. Wait, Supertramp are Brits, they would have used sceptical!

For anyone curious:
wonderful
miracle
beautiful
magical
sensible
logical
responsible
practical
dependable
clinical
intellectual
cynical
radical
liberal
fanatical
criminal
acceptable
respecable
presentable
vegetable

*I say this solely on the basis of having it stuck in your head for days on end. This is in no way, shape or form a knock to Supertramp. Don't make me start arguing for an appreciation of Prog Rock and liberal use of Wurlitzer electric pianos!