i thought americans did things cause they wanted to. and made up excuses to justify it only when questioned. that or ive been americaning wrong for decades now. nah, its right cause i say so.
Well, we're wildly off topic in here now, but the game title is "Something to Write About:" so I hope the mods don't get too irked with it.
This usually comes up with things like "Colour" and "Honour", and while I don't know the real etymological reasoning, I just joke about it being one more way that the USA points out that "We don't need U in our lives."
There are a good number of differences, and sometimes it goes the other way. In American English, you don't see people using the word "Connexion", unless they're idiots trying to look special for finding a 'new' spelling. We would write "Connection", and that difference is largely migrating back through UK English as well, though there are still some holdouts. Then there's the whole RE vs. ER when it comes to Meter, Theater and such.
And while you're absolutely not wrong that sometimes it's just "Because they wanted to", you also have to factor in the reality that a lot of it is simply "They're too stupid to know any better". I've seen so many of my fellow former schoolmates that demonstrably don't seem to know jack shit, and I don't grok how other than through willful ignorance, because we had the exact same education. Facts didn't change from one class to the next, there was no Fox News vs. CNN issue in my day, you simply all had the same source material.
I'm far from flawless, but ooh, they get me riled up some days. I had to live through the pre-Internet slow speed dialup days, when morons on the BBS systems started using good ol' L337 Sp43k. I said then, and I maintain to this very day, that nothing, ever, should be referred to as 'kewl'. Because if you said that, it most definitely could not be.