my favorite color is gray. or is my favorite color gray. or is my favorite colour gray

my mother read us lots of roald dahl when i was young. for those unaware, the man's brillant and the man's a brit.
so our books were full of "ou" spellings. at some point i was obsessed with that. it looked cooler and smarter and better. colour is always better than color.

then i got over it.
i think they edit all of the british books into american. im not sure if that is common place, but I know they atleast did such for the whole harry potter series. they also cleaned it up for slang, because its too laborous for a child or even adult reader to figure out (use some critical thinking, phone a friend, google it) the difference between a trainer and a sneaker.

then recently i got into a confused conversation about the difference between "grey" and "gray." im not really sure how it came up, but it definately did and it was definately confused.
there was an arguement that "grey" is soley a verb.
and that "gray" is an adjective or a noun.
but it was also argued that the difference is purely a british vs. american thing and only pretentious people would use the spelling "grey" to appear more educated than the others.

well, apparently other people have been unsettled by this question too.
http://www.bernzilla.com/item.php?id=232
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=235359
http://flakmag.com/misc/grey.html
http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic9239.html

and, apparently, its just a brits vs. 'mericans thing and not reasonable or very dynamic.
wikianswers says: The spelling, one refers to clothes the other hair.


so we get nowhere.

regardless, i will always have respect for those brits and the way they do things. its okay to be polished yet a little offkilter.