With respect to all of my esteemed UK (and to a lesser extent, Australian) comrades*...
I appreciate your frustration at having ¨your¨ language constantly corrupted by us lowly colonists, but must we constantly lay the blame on the stupidity of the American public? While I agree it is of a vast and unplumbed depth, with many thermal layers, it really isn´t OUR fault that the marketing majors who end up running publishing companies arbitrarily decide these things for us. And while it is certainly annoying for ALL of us in the English-speaking world to have different ¨versions¨ of everything from book titles to songs (¨Cum On Feel the Noyze¨) to TV shows (the ¨Office¨, anyone?), the frustration runs both ways.
Case in point: Blues Clues. My eldest was a toddler when we lived in the Midlands. She loved Blues Clues. In America, Steve talks to his friends Shovel and Pail. In the UK, Kevin talks to his friends Spade and Bucket. Big deal. The only thing that bothered me was that the BBC was too cheap to re-shoot the drawing sequences, so that when Kevin (a black man) would draw the clues in his Handy Dandy Notebook, we would see Steve´s very very white hands doing the drawing.
Oh, on a similar note... sorry about sending Barney over there, but you retaliated brilliantly with the Teletubbies. Same goes for the Wiggles.
My point is that having similar, but unique, cultural backgrounds is not a reason to blather on about how stupid we all are. Keep in mind that yours is not the only heritage we have. We have Germans, Scandinavians, Jews, Asians, Africans and numerous other cultures mixed up with ours. (I mention the Germans first because it seems many of our linguistic differences come from the large numbers of Germans that settled the West and became teachers.) We don´t all have time to learn about every obscure crevice of English history, and your tirades about some perceived colloquial slight are often our first inkling that we have been given yet another altered version in the first place.
Ponder for a moment the inferiority complex you reveal when you constantly harp on a few minor linguistic and cultural differences:
* We don´t need an extra ¨U¨ in ¨neighbor¨ or ¨favorite¨ -- get over it.
* ¨Hot¨ is not a verb, therefore, things cannot ¨hot up¨. They can HEAT up, though.
* You will never convince us that ¨aluminium¨ exists -- quit trying.
* Mum works for you, but she´s my MOM. Don´t talk no smack ´bout my momma.
* Bands that sound exactly like Oasis no longer appeal to us; the same will soon be true of Coldplay.
* While I´m at it, that Spanish resort town is NOT pronounced ¨Eye-BEETH-her¨... it´s Ibiza, dammit!
Okay, okay... now I´m doing it. I can sympathize with your pain.
But remember, we are all friends, and unlike the French -- who do not speak THE international linqua franca, funnily enough -- we don´t have an ¨Academie d´Anglaise¨ to dicatate what is correct and proper. And don´t hand me that line about it being ¨The Queen´s English¨... because guess what -- she´s German!
*
This post is intended to be read with a playful spirit of fun. After 3 years serving as the only American on a 24-hour watch floor at a RAF camp in the Midlands, I learned a deep appreciation of sarcasm, and the noble past-time of ¨winding up the Yank¨. This is my humble tribute to those lessons, and to the miserable bastards ...er, fine lads, that is... who taught me. 
