@ Methuselas
I think its YOU that's displaying the ignorance. For a start, when America rebelled, England had a king. Therefore the US, would've been rebelling against King's English, if such a term existed then, which I doubt very much.
Secondly, the revising of English spelling (in the US) has been attributed to Noah Webster, and to a lesser degree, Mark Twain (although I gather this can still be debated). Also, don't forget spelling was non-standardized, and only became so when people decided to write dictionaries (even in print it is inconsistent - writers like Shakespeare spelled words many different ways).
The us of z in standardize, realize etc is perfectly good British English spelling. Many people use s instead, but the older z variation is acceptable (I tend to use it because I prefer it). The suggestion that people in the US used different spellings as a form of rebellion is just ridiculous.
It is far more likely they use them because scholars like Webster believed them to be superfluous. The reason that the Us exist in such words as colour is due to the fact that they came in to English from French cf couleur, for example.
English is not created from 'butchered' words. English is a rich hotch-potch of languages. That is why we have such a large vocabulary (in fact, I believe it is the largest vocabulary in the world). The biggest contributors to the pot are Gaelic, Latin, Norse, French, Old English (which is one of the West Germanic languages, like Dutch, modern German, Frisian etc), the old Scandanavian languages (which are now Danish and Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese etc). We also have more recent influences, from languages such as Urdu, Hindustani, Punjabi etc
I think you just wanted to use your post to attack the British posters in this forum, rather than have some kind of discussion about language.
