Holy F!, these petty pissing matches are endlessly tiresome.
http://grammarist.com/spelling/aluminium-aluminum/:
Aluminum is the American and Canadian spelling for the silver-white metallic element (number 13 on the periodic table) abundant in the earth’s crust. Aluminium is the preferred spelling outside North America. Neither term is superior to the other, and both are etymologically and logically justifiable.
And:
It’s clear that the shift in the USA from –ium to –um took place progressively over a period starting in about 1895, when the metal began to be widely available and the word started to be needed in popular writing. It is easy to imagine journalists turning for confirmation to Webster’s Dictionary, still the most influential work at that time, and adopting its spelling. The official change in the US to the –um spelling happened quite late: the American Chemical Society only adopted it in 1925, though this was clearly in response to the popular shift that had already taken place. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially standardised on aluminium in 1990, though this has done nothing, of course, to change the way people in the US spell it for day to day purposes.
Finally, moral of the larger F'g story:
[color=#FFFF00]It’s a word that demonstrates the often tangled and subtle nature of word history, and how a simple statement about differences in spelling can cover a complicated story.[/color]
Hopefully, but unlikely, The End
.