A vowel conspiracy

This post was going to be headed ‘humour’ but then the spelling checker started bugging me about the US spelling of ‘humor’. And then I thought about ‘colour’ and wondered what they were doing with all the spare ‘u’s? Are they being stored in a hollowed out mountain in the mid west, and if so why?

And then there was ‘organise’ and organize’ and I understood that this was much bigger than I had at first realis(z)ed, it includes consonants!

(For now, I will continue to use the UK spelling.)