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If this had to do with mathematics or other witchcraft I'd let you have this one. But since this is my area let me enlighten you on why you shouldn't pick and choose how to spell words.
1. You live in the United States.
Yes, that's true.
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2. Spelling has nothing to do what's "correct" or convenient in your mind. When writing standards are in question we refer to Merriam Webster
http://www.merriam-webster.com/ and AP style
http://www.apstylebook.com/ to solve baseless arguments. Merriam Webster and AP Style don't recognize "favourite" as a word. You're spelling it incorrectly.
That's not true. There is no "official" written English. We don't have an "Academy of the English Language" similar to most other languages. All language, spelling, grammar, etc., in the english language is simply a matter of convention. There is absolutely no body that has any authoritative answer to any grammatical or stylistic question you could ever ask (unless, of course, you are, for example, writing a paper for the American Psychological Assocation, in which case you would clearly want to follow the
conventions in the APA style book). And it just so happens that for every single other english speaker in the entire world, the convention is to spell it as "favourite". It was only changed in the united states because people wanted to be different around the time of the revolutionary war.
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It's fine if you want to be stubborn on this topic, but let's not brainwash this poor kid into thinking spelling incorrectly is OK. It will do him no favors in life (or his English papers).
I will be stubborn, and I will try to undo the brainwashing of the american school system that drops letters haphazardly from words willy nilly because some dude 300 years ago said we should. Down with the systematic stupidity!
Also, if his experience is anything like mine, it will do him no favours but harm him in no way whatsoever, unless you classify "harm" as "having to occasionally explain to people why the spelling is perfectly valid and there is absolutely no authority anywhere within the english language that anybody can point to to say otherwise since no such authoritative body exists", but that would be quite the stretch.